XGI, VIA Release Open Source Drivers

An anonymous reader writes "XGI has announced the release of open source drivers for its Volari family of graphics adapters. Efforts at X.Org to merge the new code into the head branch are already underway. Almost simultaneously, VIA has announced the immediate release of open source drivers for S3 Graphics UniChrome, VIA ProSavage and ProSavage DDR. Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?"

Comments

Doubt it

[soniCron88]

"Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?"

I doubt it. Just a coincidence. Wishful thinking. Once nVidia releases open source drivers, you may start to think otherwise.

Re:Doubt it

[erikharrison]

nVidia does release open source drivers. The nv driver in X.org is maintained by nVidia.

The nvidia driver, however, is not open source. The difference is the nv driver supports 2d acceleration only, whereas the nvidia binary driver supports hardware 3d.

Unless I misread the XGI info incorrectly, this is exactly the same case with them - they have binary drivers that support hardware 2d and 3d, and they have open sourced their 2d code.

Not sure about the situation with Via, but overall, I think this is a trend. Assuming that the hardware manufacturers are right, and open sourceing the complete stack would give away proprietary and competitive secrets, open sourcing the 2d path likely holds no such danger - it's old, and 2d ain't where it's at any more. Open sourcing the 2d code wins points, and possibly developers.

XGI is decent for desktops but lacking in gaming

[gmikej]

I bought a XGI card for my HTPC thinking that it would be the ideal card for my analog TV (s-video was supposed to be great). It works alright- but it will not boot to ONLY S-video. That means that every time I need to reboot the HTPC I need to drag in my monitor.

I've heard that newer NVidia cards can boot straight to TV.

Now I just have to decide on whether I wait for someone to work out a Open source driver for the XGI card or just spend the ~$40 on a NVidia card when I have a perfectly decent XGI card already.

heh- who am I kidding. I'm cheap. And patient.

...
Come on guys- let's start reverse engineering these XGI drivers!

XGI drivers are 2D only

[olafura]

When looking through the kernel source code there is only support for 2D. Kernel bugreport X.org bugreport

Ok this is really good news...

[Chordonblue]

Why? Well, I have a bunch of machines here that use the KM 266 Via Chipset and support is scarce. Even proper 2D support is rare (I've only seen it in Fedora 3 and SUSE). Other than that, most other distros will either report 24 bit color (it's 32), or force you to use the generic VGA driver (which is SLOWwww).

And 3D support? Non-existant. Not that the 3D is spectacular on the KM series anyway, but it's certainly passable for screen savers, programs like Celestia, and other non-'Doom 3' purposs.

And it's not as though the KM 266 isn't capable of better. Under Windows it performs just great for what most of my users want - just not under Linux.

Thank you VIA, it will only help you...

Not as big a deal as the headlines say

[jensend]

The XGI release is 2d only (the kernel code is for fb support, not DRI), and from what I see on the Unichrome driver effort's mailing list archives the VIA source release is just making available to everyone what has been available through a "developer portal" for some time and does not make any more of the chipsets' features usable.

So the only possible real news here is a shift in the attitudes of these companies. We'll see how that works out in the future (whether enough information is released to allow open-source 3d drivers for XGI and full support for the VIA MPEG enc/dec acceleration).

Open Source Hardware

[rinkjustice]

Could these moves signal the beginning of a period of rapid improvement in Free drivers for video cards?

There's even open source hardware from the Open Source Project (OGP) coming out (info here and here, and the /. story here). for those who don't read the Developers section.

The PCI version is due soon, and reported to have resolutions up to 2048x2048, dual-link DVI and TV-out (but won't be capable of playing HalfLife2 or anything like that).

Text of the VIA license (found in each src file)

[frag thief]

/*
* Copyright 1998-2005 VIA Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
* Copyright 2001-2005 S3 Graphics, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*
* Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
* copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
* to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
* the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub license,
* and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
* Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
*
* The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the
* next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions
* of the Software.
*
* THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
* IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
* FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
* VIA, S3 GRAPHICS, AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR
* OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE,
* ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
* DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
*/

Re:Others need to follow.

[FreonTrip]

You may want to know that Matrox just released new Linux drivers for the first time in many months. Head over to their page.

Re:Hopefully..

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I looked, the Matrox drivers that were open source only supported basic 3D stuff, with everything else being in the mga_hal binary, x86-only, module.

"man mga" reveals it's a bit more confusing:

The second head of dual-head cards is supported for the G450 and G550. Support for the second head on G400 cards requires a binary-only "mga_hal" module that is available from Matrox , and may be on the CD supplied with the card. That module also provides various other enhancements, and may be necessary to use the DVI (digital) output on the G550 (and other cards).

So HAL doesn't affect 3D support. My single-head G400 with no TV-out worked fine in 2D and 3D without mga_hal, which is why I bought it, but the 3D was really slow compared to other cards (not good enough for most recent commercial games, but Quake 1, GLtron, and Tuxracer worked OK).

For cards newer than the G550 (like the triple-head Parhelia), Matrox seems to have stopped supporting open-source entirely, making the Radeon 9250 the best chip with open-source 3D drivers.

ATI still garbage.

[Inoshiro]

Won't compile with 2.6.11? Check.
Compiles with BIG, LARGE warnings about depreciated features being used in 2.6.10? Check.
Won't work under x64_64? Check.
2D part of drivers buggy? Check.
Infrequent releases that don't correct problems? Check.
No support for X RandR? Check.

Sorry, the ATI drivers don't pass muster. Perhaps I should've realized sooner with the constant weird 2D bugs I had with the ATI driver. Or the fact it wouldn't compile on 2.6.11. Or the fact it just plain won't work as advertised on 64-bit Linux.

I took out my Radeon 8500, put in a Geforce 2MX I had, and installed the nVidia driver. It was actually wrapped in an installer, rather than me having to manually untar and run scripts ala ATI. It asked if I wanted 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries. It told me that the 2.6.11 kernel fixed some AGP issues and was reccomended (which was good since I already had it, and only used the 2.6.10 because of ATI). X RandR started to work with the nVidia driver. 64-bit and 32-bit apps work flawlessly with each other.

ATI is shit. Their card hardware may be good, but without a driver, it might as well be an ISA SB16 for all the use I get out of it.

Re:ATI still garbage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? When's the last time you tried these drivers? I had them working perfectly under 2.6.10 and they compiled fine under 2.6.11 as well. No warnings, no errors.

They also have drivers for x86_64.

2D support buggy? What's wrong? Everything looks fine to me. 3D support may not be all there compared to nvidia, but 2D is fine.

You score points for the last two though. They do have infrequent releases that don't resolve problems and there's no support for X RanR as far as I know.

Re:ATI still garbage.

[kangpeh]

ATI does in fact run quite nicely under Linux using the fglrx drivers. With a little bit of effort (i.e., compiling the driver, loading it into the kernel as a module, re-configuring your x-org configuration to use fglrx rather than ati/radeon, and so forth), X-org will run very smoothly and rapidly with an ATI video card.

Try comparing the amount of frames per second you get with glxgears using the Mesa 3D Open Source ATI drivers versus the proprietary fglrx drivers supplied by ATI. I think you will get 100 times more frames in a second with the ATI fglrx drivers.

Using the fglrx drivers, I am able to play all games, including Legends, Cube, Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, Americas Army, Frozen Bubble, Super Tux, Tux Racer, Counterstrike, and others, just to name a few.

The only setbacks seen with the fglrx drivers would be that of the mentioned lack of XRandR support as well as a lack of XCompMgr support (for drop shadows/transparency). However, such minor setbacks on 'beauty' shouldn't be a big decision when choosing which drivers to use.

ATI does not "fail it." While, they do not support the open source community as much as we would like (as, persay, NVidia Corp), they do in fact give us enough support as of right now to be comfortable. ATI's main clientele, as are most video card manufacturers/distributors, are Microsoft Windows users. You'll need to keep in mind, their programmers/staff should be put forth to work on what is important to the financial situation of the company rather than pleasing us Linux users - for now.

After all, a company does not exist without money.

Re:So what card?

[Java Ape]

I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago. I have been avoiding ATI cards in my Linux boxes, but I was converting a nasty windows box for a friend, and he had a decent ATI card in it. I decided to try to ATI drivers, rather than dredge through the parts box for an old nVidia card. The result was one of the nicest looking and most stable X-org setups I've seen. The only oddity I noticed was that highlights in 3-D mode seemed a bit overly bright. Overall, I'm far more impressed than I expected to be.