14 Staging Drivers Get Nuked From Linux 3.17

[TheLexMachine]

What part of "pure luck" is so hard for you to grasp? Unless Microsoft stated in their Windos XP EULA (which is the closest to a contract you have with them) that any driver written for that version of Windows will continue to work with all the future Windows versions in the next 10 years then it's just a coincidence.

Microsoft now provides drivers for certain kinds of hardware that allow them to "just work" due to changes in the OS since XP. Quite a few USB peripherals with outdated manufacturer drivers fall into that category.

[Kivada]

Big, big, big mistake.

Hmm... Crystal HD...
=
Something tells me that this chipset isn't obsolete.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Broadcom_Crystal_HD

So why remove it? How long has the so-called "Crystal HD" been out? What's so special about that name other than the fact it does audio/video decoding? What products have Crystal HD in it?

Would Linus Torvalds be happy about the cleanup of crystalhd? I don't know...

Crystal HD Decodes New Linux Support Improvements

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTUzMTE

http://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/CrystalHD_progress.html

The CrystalHD is outdated these days. If anything Broadcom will produce a new DSP for H.265 and VP9, it'd also be able to handle the old codecs because DSPs are programmable.

As a bonus perhaps the DSP could also be used for OpenCL as apparently they are going to be using them for GPGPU in ARM SoCs making use of HSA.

[TheLexMachine]

I highly doubt Broadcom will make a second go at add-in decoders given the outcome of the CrystalHD - two years of mediocre support and then go fuck yourself if you bought the hardware - and the fact that hardware accelerated decoding of the next-gen codecs using OpenCL and GPU functions is already well into development with both current and next-gen hardware. There's just no real market or place for another follow-up.

[Kivada]

I highly doubt Broadcom will make a second go at add-in decoders given the outcome of the CrystalHD - two years of mediocre support and then go fuck yourself if you bought the hardware - and the fact that hardware accelerated decoding of the next-gen codecs using OpenCL and GPU functions is already well into development with both current and next-gen hardware. There's just no real market or place for another follow-up.

Well CrystalHD was meant as a retrofit upgrade for older laptops that had an open mPCIe card slot that couldn't accelerate modern codecs because you can't replace the GPU in them with a more modern GPU that had that support built in. Theres still millions of laptops that fall into this category for the new codecs, so if the CrystalHD turned a profit then odds are they'll make an updated version once the new codecs are finalized.

[TheLexMachine]

Well CrystalHD was meant as a retrofit upgrade for older laptops that had an open mPCIe card slot that couldn't accelerate modern codecs because you can't replace the GPU in them with a more modern GPU that had that support built in. Theres still millions of laptops that fall into this category for the new codecs, so if the CrystalHD turned a profit then odds are they'll make an updated version once the new codecs are finalized.

CrystalHD was intended for the - back in 2009 - exploding market segment of cheap Intel-based netbooks to provide acceleration of HD video streams at the cost of a WiFi card, which could easily be replaced by a mini USB WiFI adapter. Because the netbook market died at the end of 2011, Broadcom discontinued support for the CrystalHD hardware in 2012 as OEM's were not buying up the product for a market segment that no longer existed. Tablets were coming on the scene - ironically using the exact same BCM hardware - and effectively killed the future of CrystalHD.

[Kivada]

CrystalHD was intended for the - back in 2009 - exploding market segment of cheap Intel-based netbooks to provide acceleration of HD video streams at the cost of a WiFi card, which could easily be replaced by a mini USB WiFI adapter. Because the netbook market died at the end of 2011, Broadcom discontinued support for the CrystalHD hardware in 2012 as OEM's were not buying up the product for a market segment that no longer existed. Tablets were coming on the scene - ironically using the exact same BCM hardware - and effectively killed the future of CrystalHD.

It wasn't just for netbooks, I work in a computer repair and custom build shop, I personally installed a few dozen CrystalHD chips into laptops, many of which had 2 mPCIe card slots.

Most laptops, even the cheapass ones still have 2 mPCIe card slots, mainly because it gave options for the wifi/blutooth/gps/cell network and SSDs.

In another few years we'll have yet newer codecs and instead of an mPCIe card we'll be talking about an M.2 card.

[moxfyre]

Kivada, @TheLexMachine,

I know this is a very old thread, but if anyone is still interested in CrystalHD, there is a working driver for modern kernels here: github

I recently updated it to work on kernel 4.4.0, and now my vintage 2009 nettop is happily playing HD video. It's a shame that this great piece of hardware and its driver have been neglected.

I also filed an Ubuntu bug since I'm hoping to get the kernel driver package re-added to the Ubuntu repositories, from which it was somewhat-confusingly removed a few years ago: bug on launchpad.

[Guest]

moxfyre careful, somebody might just attempt to hire you to maintain their old drivers indefintely. Was it ever included to stock kernel (yeah, I'm that lazy for one google search)? You plan to maintain that project long term? If yes, have you sent RFC to LKML (assuming license permits it which it does IIRC) ?