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Basic Linux Boot On Open Graphics Card
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."
Well obviously it's of academic interest. American consumers have sunk billions into video card research and for the most part the implementations are shrouded in mystery locked up in labs. Nobody un-NDA-bound really knows how to build these things: computer graphics is a highly specialized and difficult problem for hardware engineers. The real interest is in making a hardware design that actually works well and then writing up the design in abstract, not to actually make working video cards.
Also I guess it's useful to hammer out some foundational "building blocks" and make them available freely so that entry into video card research is easier.
Also, they can't possibly approach competing with NVidia or ATI
If you are running Windows on an x86 box, this may be true. Move to FreeBSD on an ARM embedded display and getting the drivers becomes dicey. Want to optimize medical imaging requiring 48 bit color rather than a typical game? Bet you will have better luck with an FPGA than an off the shelf card.
We're geeks... So the reason is "because we can". It provides a system where we don't have another blackbox. We can actually understand down to the lowest level how things are working. This is great for people who desire to understand how things work, and also people that hope for a future of machines and hardware that are under the control of the owners.
Sorry to get a bit crazy here, but imagine a world with technology like that in Ghost in the Shell. I would not go getting such implants and additions if I did not and could not have complete control and understanding over the stuff. This type of project is a small step in maintaining individual control.
One attempt by Banzi http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing
But it probably still uses a 8x16 pixel font, which doesn't look that good on a 30" screen.
I think the idea is that the video card could pretend it's VGA, while substituting an antialiased 32x64 font in its place. Nothing earthshaking of course, but that sure would look nice.
Your text mode could look like this
Ok, and how many people are going to run a desktop on it? It's server hardware.
Again, you seem to be missing my point. Yes, Linux technically doesn't need the BIOS. Yes, there exist other architectures besides x86.
But, a video card is a product for desktops, and the vast majority of desktops are x86. The vast majority of those start booting in text mode.
Pretty much all other architectures are unimportant in comparison, because they're used in embedded hardware, or are technically outdated. If anybody is going to buy this thing, I doubt they're going to put it into a modern Sun server.
It's already a project that's going to find it hard to get wide adoption, why would you make it even harder for it to find an use, by making it incompatible with the most common by far hardware it could be plugged into?