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VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

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  • VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

    Phoronix: VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

    In years past we long heard about lofty goals out of VIA Technologies for being open-source friendly and ultimately come up with a Mesa Gallium3D driver. We haven't heard anything officially out of VIA in a great number of months, but it turns out they do now have a Gallium3D driver for Chrome 9!..

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    I thought the lisence of the gallium3d-infrastructure only allows that you can use it for opensource drivers?

    So did I get that wrong or will we see soon a law suit maybe? ^^

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    • #3
      Originally posted by blackiwid View Post
      I thought the lisence of the gallium3d-infrastructure only allows that you can use it for opensource drivers?

      So did I get that wrong or will we see soon a law suit maybe? ^^
      Why are you excited about a lawsuit?

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      • #4
        Originally posted by blackiwid View Post
        I thought the lisence of the gallium3d-infrastructure only allows that you can use it for opensource drivers?

        So did I get that wrong or will we see soon a law suit maybe? ^^
        The gallium source is generally not GPL. Parts of Mesa are LGPL, and it seems that some is Boost PL, but most of it has a fairly liberal license. For most of the gallium files I've looked at the license says something like the following:

        Copyright ${YEAR} ${AUTHOR_NAME}
        All Rights Reserved.

        Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sub license, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

        The above copyright notice and this permission notice (including the next paragraph) shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

        THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL VMWARE AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
        With that being the case, as long as VIA hasn't actually modified the Mesa source that falls under the LGPL, then I think they're in the clear for now. I don't think they're under any legal obligation to release the Gallium source for their driver... as much as we want them to, and as much as it would help everyone involved.

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        • #5
          IIRC it was LunarGlass (LunarG's shader compiler framework using two levels of LLVM IR, one "generic" and one "hw-specific") that was GPLv2 and/or commercially licensed.
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          • #6
            Interesting. So we sooner saw a proprietary driver on Gallium3D than the Intel open-source one...

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            • #7
              It may not be proprietary, just releasing the binary in parallel with jumping through the hoops to release the source. I don't know if that's actually the case, just mentioning the possibility.

              AFAIK there are already Gallium3D-based proprietary drivers out there, they just run on Windows rather than Linux.
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              • #8
                Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                It may not be proprietary, just releasing the binary in parallel with jumping through the hoops to release the source. I don't know if that's actually the case, just mentioning the possibility.

                AFAIK there are already Gallium3D-based proprietary drivers out there, they just run on Windows rather than Linux.
                Any examples of such drivers in Windows?

                Catalyst on Windows is still..well, AMD's own proprietary code. Same with Nvidia's ForceWare. And VIA has been mostly dead in the Windows space already, so I highly doubt they have a Gallium3D-based driver for Windows.

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
                  Any examples of such drivers in Windows?

                  Catalyst on Windows is still..well, AMD's own proprietary code. Same with Nvidia's ForceWare. And VIA has been mostly dead in the Windows space already, so I highly doubt they have a Gallium3D-based driver for Windows.
                  I have read here on phoronix about an embedded mobile GPU that AMD was responsible for that uses a gallium driver for windows. I forget the details but it was here on phoronix that I read about it.

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                  • #10
                    Personally I could care less if it's open source or not, as long as it falls under free to use and free to redistribute then that's fine with me. I'm just glad VIA finally has something that works. The most I knew of VIA's capabilities were KMS support and unaccelerated 1080p support. So, to see 3D acceleration working is very nice and now VIA is more considerable as a linux platform. To me it never made sense why they put so much effort toward Windows. VIA is popular in places where Windows 85%+ market share and Windows in general is a little too heavy to VIA's products.

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