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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.
Yes, but does it support -- World of Warcraft?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I hope that this goes better than VIA's prior activities in this area. VIA has some very, very cute hardware for linux project purposes(loads of small form factor boards, without the restrictions that intel has been putting on atom), some decently interesting netbooks, etc.
If I can trust that VIA video will actually work properly under linux, their boards become considerably more attractive for my purposes. The prospect of coreboot support for such boards would be gravy. I'd love to be able to put together some little linux widgets with linux burned right into the motherboard.
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!
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
As an act of faith, we should build something cool out of this - not to mention promote them to non-gaming computer users.
If we can optimize a graphics driver or do new things with it, they can sell more hardware and everybody wins. God knows ATI isn't making any money off of their drivers.
Hopefully we can use this to drive the point home.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
The only problem on my part is that I find VIA products mediocre when it comes to gaming.
Well, what do you expect from an integrated video card? They're hardly speed demons.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
Wait, what?
NTSC ending doesn't mean we'll all be watching 720/1080. It means everything is digital, MPEG2 streams. We're all a looong way off from HDTV-to-the-door.
Their chipsets can certainly do 1080p. Look at the CN400.
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.
In the description in the link for it, it actually informs the user about needing to move some windows around due to all the buttons not being visible, something that has been a common problem while running desktops that weren't really made for low resolutions like Gnome. That's really something that should be fixed and I'm surprised it hasn't been by now. 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?
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
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.
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.
wtf are you on about, why would a firewall need a fast blit ?
I would guess you don't know shit about what a vga card does.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Even a server or firewall needs some configuration. With the driver VIA has just released, there is an Open Source driver that can display text and 2D graphics. Which will do nicely for a typical GUI (Ubuntu?), so you are not limited to the console.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I think this now brings the total drivers for the Chrome chipset to 4. There's already:
- Via proprietary binary drivers (support some 3D acceleration and TVout, but only available for specific distro/kernel combinations)
- Unichrome drivers (focus on code quality rather than features, so no 3D accel and TVout)
- Openchrome drivers (used in most distros, support some of the features, but imperfect and seem not to support Compiz)
- The new Via FOSS drivers (2D only at present)
Why couldn't VIA just contribute to one of the existing projects or send them docs and maybe funding? That would have been truely embracing open source.
I'd be interested to know if Via tried to contact any of the uni/openchrome developers.
-- Mike
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
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.
I hate to say it, but do you understand the concept of a firewall? You know, a hardened box running the minimum software necessary to inspect and pass/stop traffic?
Typically, it does not include a gui for a pretty interface.
Just saying.
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.