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http://www.opencpi.org/
http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D

For one, "most consoles" do not need hack and mod to run homebrew.

My source says Wii is just 2.6 million consoles short of outselling Xbox 360 and PS3 combined. And there is no official Community Games or Linux program for Wii; warioworld.com says you need a corporation, a leased office, and a previous title on another platform to qualify.

You can write your own games, TODAY, for the Xbox 360 using Visual Studio

If you buy a computer capable of running Visual Studio. The hardware has to be new enough, and the operating system has to be Windows. (XNA Game Studio is based on Visual C# Express, which fails in Wine.) The iPod Touch has the same restriction: you have to buy a Mac for $600 and a USB KVM switch for $60, even if you do get Xcode at no additional charge. In addition, as I understand it, if you've already written a PC game in C++, you have to rewrite all the physics and AI in C# because it's difficult to make C++ code meet the "verifiably type-safe" bar that XNA's use of the CLR requires. Rewrites introduce bugs.

and upload them to Xbox Live where you have access to a huge market approaching the size of the iPhone market. [...] the App Store model for the iPhone is the Wrong Way(tm).

The model of Creators Club (a $99 per year certificate to run homebrew) plus Community Games isn't too much different from the model of an iPhone SDK certificate plus the App Store.

The PS3 has Linux.

And, I'm told, less graphics performance than a PlayStation 1 due to the RSX lockout. Or has OpenGL on the Cell materialized yet?

The GPS thing is entirely about revenue streams ... it costs a ton of money to create digital maps, and TomTom like devices are a significant source of the revenue for them. Providing open APIs to do turn by turn GPS directions isn't going to happen whilst these devices pay the bills at the data providers.

How does Google Maps pay the bills?

Like, there's only one Linux kernel, only one C compiler, only one bash shell.. only one Perl, only one Java...

You are correct that there are only one Linux kernel, but there are other free UNIX kernels you could use instead. When it comes to compilers both LLVM and GCC are widely used. (LLVM is used in Gallum3D, the new acceleration architecture for X, and in Shark, a CPU agnostic JIT for OpenJDK. A C frontend not based on GCC is in development) There are many shells. Ubuntu, a quite popular Linux distro, actually uses dash as default /bin/sh. While it's true that only OpenJDK (if I recall correctly) passes the TCK for Java you also have competing implementations like Harmony, what Google uses on Android. You have more competition on the parts of the Java stack that takes less time to implement.

Based on what's been on IRC in the past few hours.

Q: Wait, what?

A: Code for radeonhd and the kernel providing acceleration for Radeon HD 2400 and newer. Kernel parts are already pretty much integrated; radeonhd is integrated as well, although stuff still needs to be copied to radeon.

Q: So what does this mean for the user?

A: EXA means faster GUI responsiveness. Xv means fast video. Kernel DRM is the basis for all acceleration unification (OpenGL, etc.)

Q: Speaking of OpenGL...

A: Lawl, no. Not for another few months. Most of the code we're gonna write will target Gallium, so--

Q: Gallium?

A: Gallium is the next generation of GPU acceleration. Once we get drivers ready, it'll be awesome. Linky to TG: http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D

Q: So this is just docs and some basic code?

A: Nope, no docs. AMD couldn't agree on docs before their vacation time, so I guess we'll see those in a month or so. On the other hand, we've got enough here to do a lot of stuff. It'd be nice if we had more devs, though. :3

Q: So why is there only code for radeonhd? Will radeon support this too? Why two separate drivers?

A: The reason for two separate drivers is a very long and largely silly story. I don't feel like repeating it, and I probably couldn't tell it fairly anyway.

I'll get radeonhd code ported over to radeon once my vacation's over, assuming nobody does it sooner. I can't do the HDMI audio setup without testing hardware, though; does anybody want to donate an HDMI audio-enabled monitor? :3

~ C.

Kernel modesetting is a good thing, but there is no need to put the drivers into the kernel. KMS gets you lots of good things: BSoD (much better than the display freezing with no error message), flicker-free boot, and X could be moved away from needing to run as root.

As far as the drivers themselves, the best thing for them will be the move to the Gallium3D driver model, which will greatly reduce the amount and complexity of code needed to write a new driver. [1][2][3]

Keith Packard talks in his blog [4] about kernel mode drivers, but this seems to be KMS + memory management (GEM or TTM), not having, say, the entire Radeon driver in kernel. I guess it depends on how you define drivers. or maybe the difference between classic 2d drivers and DRM drivers (I have never figured out the details of that)?

>Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel.

All X drivers are usermode. There are graphics drivers that are in the kernel (fbdev), but these are unrelated to X.

Note: I am not a X dev or even a real programmer, but I follow X blogs, mailing lists, etc, and I try to learn as much as possible about X. If I am wrong about anything here, please correct me!

[1] http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
[2] http://akademy.kde.org/conference/presentation/9.php
[3] http://zrusin.blogspot.com/search/label/Gallium3D
[4] http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/

If someone were to take Gallium 3D, for example, and write a decent API on top of it, then it's not that far fetched for a few of the IHV's to start supporting it elsewhere. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if some industrious individual in AMD or NV's research department is already doing that.

The thing with OpenGL is that it's obscenely difficult to write a driver that runs well because the API is simply a mess. None of the IHVs are happy to have a performance overhead imposed on them (obviously) but they do it because the only alternative (everyone having their own API) is even worse (unless you're Sony, and even they made an effort to put GL ES on the PS3). Current GL extensions are full of things like "if this is enabled and that extension is implemented and you're drawing an X or a Y (but not a Z) then this function's behavior is changed thusly". Hell, even the core GL spec has a ton of stuff like that in it (glEnable, anyone?). That's pretty much the entire reason for DX's success performance wise - Microsoft rips out whatever the IHVs can't make fast on their current/new cards every time they bump the version number. GL drags along concepts that haven't had silicon dedicated to them in nearly a decade, and all of that has to be supported (read: emulated) in new drivers with every new bit of code wasting cycles checking if it should be in compatibility mode.

I think AMD/ATI and NV would be extremely happy if they could get away from maintaining drivers where the first half of nearly every entry point is a tangle of "has my behavior been modified, if so reroute to alternate implementation 112". And they seem to have learned the "what one implements, we all implement" lesson pretty well (PhysX on AMD/ATI for example) so if a new API is good enough to catch any major IHV's attention, the others are likely to follow.

Gallium3d will enable just that. The Wikipedia page even mentions DirectX and wine.

That said, I don't think the uproar over OpenGL 3.0 is as widespread as the summary would have you believe. OpenGL's grave will likely be right next to Unix, X, vi and C (ie. no time soon).

But it sounds like some of them are seemingly so well known. You've mentioned Dave Airlied and Keith Packard but what about Eric Anholt (Intel), Carl Worth (Red Hat), Daniel Stone (Nokia), Adam Jackson (Red Hat), David Reveman (Novell), Matthias Hopf (Novell), Alex Deucher (AMD), Ian Romanick (IBM), Alan Coopersmith (Sun). I believe that Tungsten Graphics also employ people who work on X (or X related infrastructure).

However do projects have to have paid devs to succeed? If there is the manpower perhaps paid people are not so key?

Dipper Dan needs to model the fluid dynamics of his pipes as "anti-matter", "cursed-earth", and God-knows-what is extracted from the reservoir under the Seat of the King's Throne.

Because We know 386 hardware as used in the past will never be able to meet the demands of problems in the year 2005, or could they? This is a job for Sun Microsystems and its competitively over-priced solutions; to harness efficient supply-chains, innovate value-added paradigms, transform distributed partnerships, disintermediate mission-critical methodologies, facilitate distributed convergence, and no-less facilitate visionary channels of helping Dipper Dan to visualize the movement of feces! Surelym this must be no less than a $10,000 solution, am I wrong?

In other news, (affordable) commodity hardware, The Weather Channel-sponsored DRI Radeon graphics drivers, and intelligible internetworking of those hosts using the API developed into the Chromium Project all can be used to stuff any marketing guru.

The problem with current hardware is that it became very complex, so one needs much more time per single session of coding to achieve something useful. Long stretches of spare time are hard to come by.

Also, I want to correct you - it was Weather Channel that funded development of 3d DRI driver for radeon 8500 and 9200 cards, not ATI. (see Tungsten Graphics)

Also ATI does provide sample cards to developers which is big help (hard to find bugs in drivers without testing on real hardware).

While we're at it, why are we wasting our time with this "free" Linux kernel.

Because it actually makes sense (not that coding Linux is wasting time)? We've been developing Linux for almost 13 years now. It's mature! It works! It rocks! I dare you, find a group of skilled engineers who will work for free on OpenGL/3D Linux hardware drivers. Hint: the biggest concentration are probably working at TungstenGraphics and I don't think they work for free either.

-adnans

What ever happened to that project funded by the weather channel to make a DRI driver? When its done is anyone even going to be buying these cards anymore?

You can download the source for a beta here. The cvs files are updates regularly. I think there is a binary somewhere on the Tungsten Graphics site.

Tungsten Graphics were recently contracted by the weather channel to write accelerated xfree86 drivers for the Radeon. You can get a beta from their site. Given that ATI make their specs available and the influx of cash you'd expect the drivers to develop well.

If you mean "Open source drivers that support some of the rendering, none of the video capture, and none of the tuner", then I would guess about 18 months.

Is Brian still alive?

He works here now.

Try Tungsten Graphics instead as that's who they've become.

I was disappointed that ATI doesn't appear to be willing to fund 8500 development through Tungsten Graphics like they did a few years ago (when TG was called Precision Insight).

I was just in the market to buy and new card, and as much as I wanted an ATI, I ended up buying a GeForce3. I don't like that NVidia's stuff is a closed binary implementation, but at least they take the Linux market seriously enough to support it.

Compare these 2 web pages:

Precision Insight Team
Tungsten Graphics Team