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Talking with Timothy Miller

Posted by Hemos on from the get-to-know dept.

barryman_5000 writes "Timothy Miller has written plenty of drivers for the open source effort and now kerneltrap has an interview with him on his newest effort for an open graphic card. He talks about his background, struggle with secretive 3D vendors and more."

9 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. duh by Mr_Silver · · Score: 3, Interesting
    He has observed that there is a growing trend by graphics hardware vendors to provide less and less information to free and open source operating system developers.

    This is because the graphics card market depends on vast amounts of R&D and producing a product that is technically superior to everything else out there. Essentially being continually ahead of the game as your competitiors try to catch up.

    As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.

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    1. Re:duh by pe1rxq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There might be a lot of R&D, but also a lot of crap.

      Thinking that you can hide this precious R&D in software without anyone seeing is nonsense. (The software interface is all that is needed for writting drivers). Your competitor is going to need at most a few weeks more before they dissassembled everything. If that is enough for them to steal your market your card wasn't as far ahead as you thought.

      This 'black magic beyond us mere mortals' attitude is exactly what is to blame for this kind of thing spreading. (ie NVidea not releasing specs to their ethernet chip which ofcourse contains a lot of expensive R&D) Most stuff simply isn't as impressive as those companies want you to think.

      Jeroen

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    2. Re:duh by farnz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All a decent specification document reveals is how to tell a particular chip what to do, not how that chip does it. Any competitor knows what a chip is supposed to do (you can get that information by disassembling a binary driver, or by monitoring the bus while you send the binary driver commands), so the only "IP" you risk losing is the discovery that your "hardware" features are implemented by the device driver.

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    3. Re:duh by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.

      Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.

      I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.

      Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.

  2. iD-eal project for Carmack by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Interesting


    JC should stick some of his $ behind this project instead of making rockets.

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    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  3. Re:Erm... by koi88 · · Score: 3, Funny


    "Has wrote?"

    Should be: "Has writed"

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  4. Alternative OSs by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    These platforms, both free and non-free are valuable alternatives to the Microsoft monolith

    I hate this. I don't use an "alternative" OS any more than I drink an alternative to milk or live an "alternative" lifestyle.

    I know it's grammatically correct but it's the hidden implication that does my head in!

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    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  5. Thx mods by barryman_5000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I type "has wrote" and nearly 40 comments about how dumb I am. Next time I won't even submit news and you people can go to kerneltrap for yourselves ;) Thx mods for fixing it to "has written"

  6. FOSS by Deanalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would have no problem dropping 100 or so dollars on a card that could do 2000fps in glxgears with an open source driver in the main kernel tree (on par with my current geforce3 ti200).

    These shoddy nvidia drivers really bug me, and it would be nice to see a hardware accelerated opengl X enviroment sometime in the next 5 years (before longhorn), and that is never going to happen unless we can get some real hardware support.