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VIA Releases 800 Pages of Documentation For Linux
billybob2 writes "VIA has published three programming guides that total 800 pages in length and cover their PadLock, CX700, and VX800/820 technologies. The VIA PadLock provides a random number generator, an advanced cryptography engine, and RSA algorithm computations. The VX800 chipset was VIA's first Integrated Graphics Processor, while the CX700 is a System Media Processor designed for the mobile market. This is another step in VIA's strategy to support the development of Free and Open Source drivers under Linux, which comes pre-installed on VIA products such as the Sylvania NetBook, HP Mini-Note, 15.4" gBook, gPC, CloudBook, Zonbu, and VIA OpenBook. Earlier this week, VIA hired Linux kernel developer and GPL-Violations.org founder Harald Welte to be VIA's liason to the Open Source community."
Now Linux drivers can be written for the hardware. Just like TFS says.
Lock the wife and the dog in the boot of the car.
Return one hour later.
Who's happy to see you?
It's just a coincidence they came one after another, but I think companies are going to quickly realize that there's no benefit to keeping things locked up.
Suddenly they won't need to pay to write drivers, just release the documentation to write them (of course, it would be nice if they gave us a base). The OSS community will make the drivers more stable, cleaner, and faster. We will use the drivers for things they didn't imagine. All of this will save them money and sell their hardware (features added for free? added incentive to buy my stuff? sign me up!)
I think we may have reached critical mass, at least on the driver side.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Next step: Release the documentation for the display adapters please.
The open source drivers mostly can't handle the mpeg2/mpeg4 acceleration, and without that the Epias collapse when you try to watch some higher resolution video. That makes them quite unsuitable for living room usage, which is a shame because they could make excellent HTPCs. With better drivers the better Epia boards could handle HD video just fine..
There is no such thing as OS-specific hardware documentation. The released documentation enables all interested OS-writers/driver-writers to write compatible software.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.