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VIA Releases FOSS Graphics Driver
billybob2 writes "VIA has released a 113,800 line open source graphics driver with full mode-setting support for CRT, LCD, and DVI devices along with 2D, X-Video, and cursor acceleration. Harald Welte, VIA's open source representative, states that the next step is to add 3D (see preview), TV-out, and hardware codec support while integrating this work with existing open source projects. VIA has pre-installed Linux on a significant portion of the company's latest products, including the EVEREX gPC2, 15.4" gBook, and CloudBook. It has also helped port the open source CoreBoot BIOS (previously LinuxBIOS) to several of its motherboards." VIA seems to be making good on the promise of its open source initiative announced last April.
You don't even have to RTFA to find that out. it says it right there in the summary - 3D support is the NEXT step, but it isn't there yet.
they're mostly for onboard video chipsets, and this is awesome news for integrated devices and lightweight PCs like media centres, internet kiosks, settop boxes, netbooks, etc etc etc
simply the fact that one of the largest video chipset manufacturers in the world is writing open source drivers is huge, and an awesome step forward for linux and foss in general
not everything related to the phase "video card" is about pcie cards in sli and their crysis benchmark
So when I bought my Dell Ubuntu laptop last year, I thought, "Intel and nVidia are the LEAST evil of the graphics chipset manufaacturers." Wanting a little more oomph, I went with nVidia.
Now, a year later, nVidia is looking ridiculous by clinging to closed-source binary drivers while the rest of the industry (including ATi, for pete's sake) go open. And the fact that freaking VIA is more open than nVidia really makes me feel...frustrated. Sorry nVidia, but I can't recommend you as long as you lag like this.
Via really has no choice.
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
Atom kills VIA in Price/Performance/Power ratio across the board.
Once Intel fixes the problem of their north bridge requiring 6x the power Atom does then via is in really big trouble
It's interesting to see via go from ruling the mini-ITX market to now desparately having to play catchup in such a short time.
The only thing that's going away is over-the-air NTSC (and only analog at that; NTSC's resolution will come over the air digitally, not just HD). It'll be coming out of cable and satellite dish boxes for quite some time now, even if those devices are transitioning to direct digital out over HDMI.
Or that's my understanding of it, anyways. I haven't watched TV in several years now, if you don't count the BSG torrents.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Yeah, pretty much.
But I've had a lot of channels cut from the analog plan due to a shitty cable co, so I'm pretty much stuck with their digital plan.
OTA transmissions in Ottawa are no good. If you live in Toronto/Buffalo you're one lucky SOB, because you've got all the channels you could want in 720p/1080i for free and unencrypted. For me, not so much.
Wrong segment of the market son. VIA aren't catering to the likes of you, they are aiming for laptops and embedded SOHO stuff. This is a far more lucrative area for their business model. I don't know that they even want to compete on the cutting edge with NVidia. I'm sure they certainly have the financial capacity to do so if they desired anyway, but the market is not screaming out for dual DVI setups just yet.
Huh. That is really interesting about Toronto/ Buffalo. But I guess any OTA region with decent channels would deliver quality media for management with a MythTV setup.
When I visted family in the states, I was appalled at how prevalent Dish network and DirectTV were, even beating out the local cable companies in user-prefs, (but I guess they really really suck). Thing is, you gotta jump through hoops via long google sessions to figure out the *only* way to get MythTV manage one of those boxes, is to google, then rig up a $50 infrared transmitter/receiver setup, (in a dark room I guess, closet would do nicely) because the SAT Cos make the only tuning possiblity an infared remote, for a single stream per device.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
It was found that renaming quake.exe to quack.exe
would affect performance. The reason is that the
driver purposely degrades the quality for stuff
that is used in benchmarks. This is dishonest, and
it is a filthy hack. It's damn obvious why video
drivers are a major cause of crashes; they dig
around in kernel memory (totally undocumented) to
enable dirty hacks.
Open Source fixes this problem automatically.
Some way for X to detect that there is no way for a window to fit on the screen and add some scrolly bars to it to make everything accessible. Perhaps it's purely the fault of the window manager or library though and not X, or maybe it's both?
The original FVWM ("Feeble Virtual Window Manager") did this. FVWM is still a rather nice window manager, assuming you don't mind editing ~/.fvwmrc to adjust it.
By current units sold market share VIA is small. My understanding is that it's roughly 40% Intel, 30% NVIDIA, 20% AMD and everyone else is crammed into the remainder 10% (that's total shipments of both desktops and platforms, discrete and integrated cards). (Rummages around web) Here's a link to GPU units sold in the second and third quarters of 2007. It looks like VIA sold almost 3 times less than ATI (but they seem to be on an upward progression).
It's the timing that makes this more interesting because Intel have pushed so much work on their open source drivers they are now the easiest "current" GPUs to get going on systems like Linux. Intel have done this by hiring engineers to work on Linux AND releasing specs which is kinda a double whammy. If this turns out to be the only way companies can achieve a similar smooth out of the box operation on FOSS OSes it's not going to cheap for others. It's also interesting that AMD had also taken big steps in specs and drivers direction before this move by VIA. Some would argue VIA's hand has been forced into this if they wish to remain relevant in the FOSS playground. Others point out that this is a process that can only be started by a willing company.
This is a brave play by VIA but there are more challenges to come. The next question is what they do with regard to the OpenChrome and Unichrome drivers and how to integrate the work they've done into the xorg development process. Judging from their Linux kernel integration it looks doable so long as VIA have some help.
But in the Atom SoCs Intel are using PowerVR, which is definitely not opensource-friendly. Until someone buys ImgTec the most you'll ever get is a binary blob driver.
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
Our company works with almost a dozen hardware vendors, and none of them are so hard to work with and so open source hostile as intel. Try getting the documentation for the RAM controller of the chipset you mentioned.
On top of that, they fell behind badly in terms of performance, and the great signal quality from their cards is mostly meaningless in the age of DVI.
Looks almost like a case of corporate suicide, as in "nobody can be THAT stupid, so it must be intentional" ;-).
C - the footgun of programming languages
Posted only today, the answer to your question is available from the same source as the original article:
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2008/09/01/#20080901-via-xorg-opensource-faq