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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.
I really find it hard to accept that a company that around 5 years ago copied GPL code in many of their stuff made such a 180 turn and is now with full commitment in actually supporting the stuff that they have been copying for so long. The motives behind it and better: who was able to make this shift possible from inside the company, hiring an OpenSource devver is one, but the process before that is much more interesting.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Well, I think a simple start would be to come up with a nice polished compiz theme and desktop (like a good avant dock with some nice icons) that uses this driver to its fullest. We are now at the point where a Linux Desktop can look as good as, if not better than, Windows or the Mac.
Give the average Joe Bloggs a PC running Linux that is relatively immune to viruses and auto-updates Firefox, Flash, Java, GNOME/KDE and VLC when its not being used and you have one happy computer user.
Build computers that use VIA chipsets for all the family that you run tech support for and lets start driving Linux adoption up! The drivers are here.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Via really has no choice.
Agreed, everyone except for nVidia and maybe Matrox (side note: what a shitty company) is opening their specs.
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
It sucks up 22W+ by itself though, and is very old. It's nothing compared to the VX800 or CN896.
Atom kills VIA in Price/Performance/Power ratio across the board.
-Price: Maybe. If you just want entry-level options (ie bare to the bone) and don't care about power usage, it's definately cheaper. Normal VIA parts are sold like boutique items. Except, strangely, their mATX boards go for 50$.
-Performance: Definately not, now that Nano has been released (but damnit sell 'em at retail!).
-Power ration: What? Nano desktop parts are what people have been measuring. Typical ULV C7s are like 4W-7W. Considering you get a chipset that ranges in that wattage too, and this is honest counting unlike Intel, VIA certainely has the upper hand.
Not to mention they don't need a P4 connector...
Once Intel fixes the problem of their north bridge requiring 6x the power Atom does then via is in really big trouble
Unlikely. Intel does not want to lose Celeron sales for the Atom. So their miniITX boards remain crap so they can sell whatever 945G boards they have left over that failed their low-voltage tests.
It's interesting to see via go from ruling the mini-ITX market to now desparately having to play catchup in such a short time.
I wouldn't call it catch up, but it's nice to see Intel and VIA compete. The only thing is I hope it drives down the price of VIA parts, at least within the 90$-150$ range, otherwise it's been a waste of time.
VIA is actually in the embedded x86 space. Home routers, MIDs, and other appliance-like consumer devices seem to be appropriate uses of VIA's chips. Companies there are mainly using Linux(there are exceptions), so I don't see any other choice for VIA but to start improving their Linux support and releasing open source drivers. VIA's cpus can't really compete with normal consumer desktops. Intel's integrated graphics and low power cpus are much more capable, but not as cheap or quite as low power (yet).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Linux is getting hugely popular on the low cost laptop scene here in Asia. When you overhear the average person on the street discussing the benefits of Ubuntu (or whatever) over Apple or Microsoft, it is safe to say that these latter two entities are no longer nearly as relevant as they once were.
If VIA didn't do anything about this they would absolutely lose out big time to the competition. People want cheap, they don't want to buy hardware and then have to pay more than it cost just for the operating system and an office suite. This action at its core is likely driven by profits and not good will, at least not in the upper reaches of the company anyway.
I'm all for proprietary software and write it myself, but my experience with ATI tells me closed video drivers in linux are an extreme pain every time you do a kernel update. That's why I'll buy Intel next time -- existing open source drivers, not just specs. Whenever VIA gets 3D support done open source I'll consider them too.
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Good for you. For me, I dropped $600+ on two cards in order to drive 4 monitors - all based on this supposedly great support they had for linux.
The drivers didn't effing work and the 'support' was completely worthless, little better than "did you plug in the cable" level.
I had to pay another ~$200 for two gefen "dvi doctors" in order to fix an obvious bug in nvidia's driver, a bug I could have fixed myself faster than it would have taken to recompile the drivers if I had source.
Three years later, their drivers still lag without full support for randr.
Your personal experience doesn't mean shit.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Matrox used to have wonderfully open hardware with the specs downloadable directly from their own website and a dedicated developer relations team to help with any queries. They were the perfect model of how to do it.
Then something happened. I don't know what: brain-slugs, possibly. They yanked everything, even the specs for older hardware, and stopped communicating. What a bunch of dicks.
Although I very much welcome all the open-source graphics drivers, it is important to note that none of the open-source drivers discussed (Ati, VIA) support 3D and hence, compiz. From what I have learned, X itself is partly to blame here though I do not know the details. This will change in the next few months with GEM and DRI2, but I suspect it will at least be a year after that before the drivers catch up.
So, don't feel bad about your nVidia card. Realistically, they're still the best supplier of powerful 3D support under Linux. There is open-source compiz support for Intel chipsets and older Ati cards (r300 driver), and maybe others. But none of them match the power of Nvidia; fglrx comes close, but since it has bugs which prevent you from running Wine, full-screen Xv or MythTv, it just isn't there yet.
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
?? Didn't someone just do a watt/performance comparison of the atom _platform_ against an amd64, and it lost in both wattage and performance?!
I doubt if Intel would improve their northbridge much as they don't want this to be a viable platform against their celerons.
The whole argument for FOSS 3D video card drivers is just silly in my opinion. Very very very few people have the skills necessary to write good drivers for these chips
Here's how the Ubuntu restricted drivers installer explained it to me: If the developers of other kernel or X components can't use their debuggers to trace execution through a kernel module (or a user-mode process that has equivalent hardware access to the kernel), they can't provide support for a system that includes such a module, other than "go back to VESA". So it isn't as much a license issue as the ability to see what the code is doing and how it is interacting with other code on the same machine; even a more restrictive license such as the Microsoft Reference Source License might be a step up.
the drivers are some of the most important IP in a graphics card
Unless you mean "Internet Protocol" (and you don't), the term "intellectual property" has some undesirable baggage associated with it. It implies to the reader that 1. copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are more alike than they really are, and that 2. owners of copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets deserve exclusive rights comparable in scope to those of the holder of a plot of land. Worse, the abbrevation of "intellectual property" as "IP" implies to the reader that these two positions are so self-evident that the reader ought to have already accepted them by now.
Of course, I don't game at all
Do you babysit children who game? I do.