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VIA Releases 16K-Line FOSS Framebuffer Driver
billybob2 writes "VIA has released 16,434 Lines Of Free & Open Source code that enables Linux natively to use the framebuffer on VIA's graphics chipsets. This comes a month after VIA announced that it will provide Open-Source drivers and documentation on its Web site so that its hardware will work out of the box with Linux distributions. This gives VIA-powered systems that come pre-installed with Linux — such as the gPC, 15.4" gBook, CloudBook, and Zonbu — the ability to output graphics through digital connections such as HDMI, and probably makes them the best-supported framebuffers Linux has ever had. Look forward to documentation and X.org drivers from VIA as well in the near future."
Hey, that's 46 lines too much! Quick, someone delete 46 empty / comment lines!
This seems more like Via giving up than wanting to properly support Linux. Look at how they supported the C7 platform - it was supposed to have hardware H.264 decoding, but it was only supported by an open-source patched mplayer on Linux and never under Windows.
Via just don't want to develop their Linux drivers any more. Watch as support disappears now they don't have to.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
(1) I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of modern framebuffer management. I know our game engine has several thousand lines of code just to manage page flipping in all the various combinations (different hardware, SLI cards, etc), and that is even with DirectX drivers doing most of the heavy lifting.
(2) Why are the first few comments so negative? First you criticize all the graphics vendors becuase they won't open up their code, then when VIA goes and *does* open up their code, the first reactions are so critical? What the hell? Just take it for what it is: a gesture of openness and an opportunity for the community to pick up VIA's code and maybe make some interesting things out of it?
for those with short memories it might be worth reading the many years of complaints and downright hostility between OS developers and VIA - VIA's Australian mouthpiece Fiona has promised many times in past that info would be forthcoming - never was - until they release sensible info on the hardware (including all the numerous mis-designs that the windoze package codes around) a good driver will be a pipedream
> Why are the first few comments so negative?
> First you criticize all the graphics vendors
> becuase they won't open up their code, then
> when VIA goes and *does* open up their code,
> the first reactions are so critical?
> What the hell?
DAMN RIGHT
Hang on, you think more lines would be a boast? I would think *only* 16k lines would be the boast here.
IBM didn't hire guys with beards? Well that completely explains AIX.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Well, all I think of is BRAAAAINS!!! And how I wish to eat them.
I don't think that's an unreasonable request. It's not like I'm going to eat your eyes.
With DirectX you have to do a ton of code just to initialize a drawing environment. It's not a compact API to begin with.
Am I the only one that read Zombu as Zombo?
Well, remember, anything is possible...
This guy's the limit!
In addition, Windows Vista 64-bit requires
Which has what, exactly, to do with a Linux framebuffer driver?
Sure, having the source, we could proably port it to the Windows world, but the Windows world has no shortage of drivers already. Granted, they don't always count as the most reliable option, but at the risk of sounding a tad snarky - You run Vista 64-bit, "reliable" doesn't really enter the picture.
Welcome to Slashdot.
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Making a chip output the console to HDMI with 16k lines?
Pretty cool in my books.
If that were true, it wouldn't take 16 kLoC for a driver. With that much code, it's exposing quite a bit of hardware-specific functionality - which means hardware acceleration for something.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
if anything of what their current driver release for linux is, it has full 3d accelleration plus the much needed xv interface, I presume this code is in the release of the Framebuffer
Via has "supported" linux in the past, and all it amounted to was dumping some poorly written and undocumented code, and then not doing anything to maintain the code themselves, and not accepting accepting patches, not responding to queries for documentation/clarification from those that wanted to improve the drivers themselves.
I hope they are doing the right thing this time, and will gladly praise them if they do, but I can understand why some people would be skeptical until then.
Slashdot tends to gush whenever anyone does something nice specifically for the Linux community. Much of what Linux has in hardware support has been painfully achieved reverse-engineering.
The government can't save you.
1. Why tout 16K lines? Why give an exact number? It's like it's a boast. Except it doesn't really take that long to write 16K lines, so it's sort of a weak boast.
Well, studies have repeatedly shown that a single developer only adds about 20 correct lines of code per day. Assuming this is high quality code that has been well-tested, those 16K lines of code are nothing to scoff at.
2. On the other hand, I wonder why so many lines simply to give me a framebuffer? The card has to be programmed into the right mode, sure, but how can that possibly require 16 thousand lines?
That was my first thought too.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
It depends which 16K lines.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Not sure why you're complaining. Heck, Slashdot would provide a community service to announce this as an official offer. "Open-source your hardware driver, get a free glowing review press release as a Slashdot story."
Property is theft.
Dear /.,
I'm concerned that giving moderation access to most everyone is counterproductive. This didn't require any moderation at all. Flamebait? No. Redundant maybe, but not to the point that it's annoying. This should not have been moderated at all. The point of moderation is to find and highlight gems not bitch slap people at random.
Thanks,
Anon.
This post just gushes about VIA.
Of course, and why not? This post is about VIA providing drivers for the Linux OS.
Since when did slashdot become a site for vendors to have their sock puppets write glowing posts for them?
Based on your account number, your obviously not new around here. So why did you even make this statement? Come on, you know the answer to that. But in case you forgot I will tell you.
Slashdot will praise any company and/or its technology that provides unobstructed freedom and functionality for all the worlds' geeks. As such, they deserve to be praised. After all, this is the kind of behavior we want to encourage is it not?
Life is not for the lazy.
Based on your account number, your obviously not new around here
Back in my day, when trolls were trolls and karma was numeric, slashdot was too obscure for companies to astroturf. It was fanboi vs fanboi for glowing praise and the comment threads were full of flame. How I miss the days of ole'. It just makes me want to pour hot grits down my pants.
Please can we stay even a bit on topic here? We're talking about a Linux Framebuffer Driver here. You can't use the Linux framebuffer device drivers on Windows because they're not Windows Drivers. That's ignoring the fact that Windows already has all the display drivers it needs to use this hardware, so claiming that VIA "won't support" their hardware on Windows is just ridiculous.
Taking some arbitrary good deed by a hardware vendor and tacking a cynical "I bet it doesn't work on Windows" doesn't make you smart or insightful -- it makes your just another slashdouche.
I think they're legitimate criticisms.
That said, I'm also going to seriously look at VIA the next time I build a MythTV box. You're never going to escape criticism, no matter what you do -- but VIA absolutely did the right thing there, and I applaud them for that.
Thank you, VIA. Looks like some genuine competition for Intel as the "most well-supported Linux video cards."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What matters is that vendor support of free software is here to stay. This is a direct break in the Microsoft monopoly, as the Intel graphics effort was, and others will follow. Via realized it's more their best interest to have hardware that works than it is to try to extract control over people.
Size has nothing to do with this. If the code is small and complete, it shows that Nvidia and ATI never had much to offer and we should all wonder why they never bothered to cooperate. If the code is incomplete, more has been promised and will be delivered. All of this is great news.
Thanks VIA. Good graphics joins good power efficiency in the VIA appeal.
Unless, of course, they exaggerated how much hardware help they had. In addition, Windows Vista 64-bit requires that all drivers that include a kernel-mode component be published by an established company, or the operating system will display unhideable "Test mode" banners in the four corners of the screen. Is this something that it's impossible for the user to override? In other words, is the set of certificates or CAs hardcoded, or is it user-modifiable?
Regardless, I don't see how this affects us, either. These are drivers for Linux, so it's good that they're open. It means they can't be GPLv3, but neither can Linux itself. And it means we can't then port them to Vista 64-bit -- seems like a small loss to me.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I meant to type slashdot.org, not slashdot.org/b/
Unless, of course, they exaggerated how much hardware help they had. I bet that's the case. In the late 1990s, I sometimes had to endure slowdown caused by "modems" that were not much more than a sound card. They employed "host signal processing", which put all the modulating and demodulating into a driver on the CPU. Likewise, video codec accelerator chips might accelerate only a few steps, such as the frequency domain block transform, the motion reconstruction, and the YCC to RGB conversion, leaving the rest to the driver.
Hey, this is Slashdot; if they're a hardware manufacturer, they're doing something wrong.
Now grab your pitchfork and stop trying to be rational!
Hey, look! It's Bono's brother.
If you don't think these are the best-supported framebuffers Linux has ever had, provide a counterargument.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In January last year, a court ruled that one of the patents on which H.264 is based was invalid. It's not clear whether patent exclusions from H.264 are valid anymore.
--
make install -not war
First, let's assume there is such a study, and your recital of the findings are accurate. There's no way you can say something like, "a single developer only adds about 20 correct lines of code per day". It just doesn't make any sense.
Even if you reword it to say, "the average developer..." you still have a fairly meaningless statement. That's like saying "the average basketball player cannot slam-dunk", which is true, but doesn't tell you *anything* about any particular basketball player. After all, the vast majority of basketball players are children and at-or-below average height people playing street ball. Even a reasonably tall person (say, 6'5"), is going to have a hard time dunking a ball without a lot of effort.
Back to the "studies" (studies? really?), they really only measure an average of whatever specific development teams they measured. For example, at the start of a project, you probably write hundreds of lines of code, and as the project approaches completion, you write less and less code, perhaps only a handful of lines per day. It also doesn't take into account some developers who have very little to contribute to a specific project (i.e., do they count the UI guy's code across the whole lifetime of the project? Will that developer bring the average down from the developers who add potentially hundreds of lines per day?).
After all, American's average 1.5 children per couple, or something silly like that, as well, but it's exceeding rare to find a couple that actually has 1.5 children.
16,000 libraries of congress? That *is* a lot of data.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
H.264 decoding is a purely mathematical operation, which lies outside the scope of patentability. You might be able to patent a particular device capable of performing that operation, but not the operation itself. Any device differing substantially from the implementation described in the patent would not be covered under the patent.
You know, if you had a sensible legal system where lawyers could not demand a penny in payment before a verdict was delivered, then it would be much harder for unscrupulous corporations to drag out court cases to the point where people who are in the right can't afford to fight on. Just saying is all.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!