[Gllug] Linux graphics card

Christian Smith csmith at micromuse.com
Thu Jun 10 11:55:42 UTC 2004


On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 10:29, Tethys wrote:
>> Mike Brodbelt writes:
>
>> The problem is, there *aren't* any well supported cards with open source
>> drivers (modern cards, that is). The ATI 9200 is probably about as good
>> as you get before having to resort to closed source drivers.
>
>Yep - the second gen ATI cards do seem to be the best option. At least
>ATI contribute code, and seem to have a reasonably good attitude. The
>situation with 3D graphics cards is poor, and I can't help but think
>that the mess is at least partly due to the hordes of people who quite
>happily buy nVidia, and think they're doing us a favour by supplying
>binary drivers. <rant mode="on">I tend to look at these as the poisoned
>chalice, I'm afraid. I'm fed up of seeing hardware claiming linux
>support that you then have to go digging through mailing lists to find
>that the support is binary only, or consists of loading a windows driver
>through an emulation layer. We really need an "open source driver" stamp
>that makes buying hardware easy.</rant>


To be fair to the likes of NVidia, they probably have a lot of cross
licensed code in the drivers which would prohibit them from open sourcing
the drivers in a useful way. They are also bound by license agreements.

Of course, it'd be nice if they documented the register level interface,
mind, with some noddy sample driver code that could then be integrated
into Mesa.


Christian

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