Basic Linux Boot On Open Graphics Card

Posted by timothy on Saturday May 2, 2009 @08:37AM from the bumblebee-flies-anyway dept.

David Vuorio writes "The Open Graphics Project aims to develop a fully open-source graphics card; all specs, designs, and source code are released under Free licenses. Right now, FPGAs (large-scale reprogrammable chips) are used to build a development platform called OGD1. They've just completed an alpha version of legacy VGA emulation, apparently not an easy feat. This YouTube clip shows Gentoo booting up in text mode, with OGD1 acting as the primary display. The Linux Fund is receiving donations, so that ten OGD1 boards can be bought (at cost) for developers. Also, the FSF shows their interest by asking volunteers to help with the OGP wiki."

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Re:Do we want an open source video card? by Animats · 2009-05-02 09:22 · Score: 5, Insightful

There's not that much mystery about the things. Making a VGA emulator in an FPGA is no big deal. If all you implemented was text mode and mode 13H, it would probably boot Linux. Getting to a card that runs OpenGL is a big job, but not out of reach. The pipeline is well understood, and there are software implementations to look at. As you get to later versions of Direct-X, it gets tougher, because Microsoft controls the documentation.
But the real problem is that you'll never get anything like the performance of current generation 3D boards with an FPGA. There aren't anywhere near enough gates. You need custom silicon.