Free Software Friendly Graphics Card?

An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting discussion on KernelTrap with a hardware company that is talking about developing a 'free software friendly' graphics card. The idea is to fully disclose and document all register interfaces including the BIOS, providing Linux and BSD users with a fully supported video card. The hardware engineer proposing the idea summarizes his viewpoint saying, 'the whole issue comes down to this: This is technically feasible. Should we do it?'"

Comments

Neat idea

[AKAImBatman]

I like the idea. My only thought is, are they going to have enough pull to make this happen? Graphics cards are much more than just throwing a few hundred million transistors on a chip. You have to worry about pipeline architecture, parallel texturing units, and (most importantly) well optimized driver software.

Can this company create a card that's competitive? And if they can, will they get pushed out of business through patent litigation?

RTFA! please

[Svet-Am]

for those of us that read the article, we see that the entire nVidia/ATi argument is practically moot. the developer explicity says that the card will be primarily 2D because his employer won't give enough funding to produce an ASIC. Thus, they're using an FPGA and will only really be able to implement a 2D core.

I'll never buy Matrox again

[Svenne]

Matrox? Don't count on it. They've just "recently" gone from being one of the best supported video card makers, both 2D and 3D, in linux, to one of the absolut worst after they switched to a closed source model of providing their own drivers.

"Worst?", I hear you say, "How can that be? My ATI doesn't work great either!". Well, consider this; It's been almost a year since their last driver was released. It doesn't support Linux 2.6 yet. People are trying to patch things up, but it's a losing battle. It doesn't support SMP either, which means that any P4/HT users are out of luck. And I'm not just talking about not actively enhancing the drivers for SMP, no, it will outright crash and bring the the whole computer down with it if you som much as think of starting an OpenGL application. Oh, and while we're at it, there is of course no support at all for AMD64.

Quite frankly, Matrox has remained so apathetic to the Linux crowd that I'm now convinced that they tricked us all just to get our money, and deep down inside they just hate us.

Re:Secrets

[Crudely_Indecent]

the problem is that once you build hardware, the patent law says that your competitors can't make an exact copy of it. The card you have is no longer "Secret IP" once it's on a storeshelf. Your competitor spends $299 and has a reference board. The card he builds can't be exactly like yours, but he can take good ideas from your board and implement them as long as there isn't a patent against it.

The reason they've got such tight reigns on drivers is that drivers cost a lot of programming hours to write. That is source code that I don't think the world will see. The games released for specific video cards also have some of that driver code (provided to them via NDA) from the cardmaker. their complete source code may contain very secret IP such as chip limitations, workarounds, extra settings, and other things that they may not want their competitors and customers to know about.

Re:Secrets

[Trejkaz]

From 2002: Matrox continues to support the Linux community and is proud to release an open source driver for its flagship product Parhelia...