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:A milestone? by iamacat · 2009-05-02 08:56 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.
Re:A milestone? by auric_dude · 2009-05-02 08:57 · Score: 4, Interesting

One attempt by Banzi http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/16-11/ff_openmanufacturing