A New VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D Driver Is Under Development

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A New VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D Driver Is Under Development

While OpenChrome and the VIA DRM/KMS driver hasn't seen much public activity in quite some time and appears rather dead, apparently that's not the case. A new VIA OpenChrome Gallium3D driver was published this week in its initial rudimentary form...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTg4Mzg

[belal1]

does it matter? and who still sells boards with chrome graphics? I figured they gave up because their chrome initiative was DOA. Too bad too because if we had another graphics vendor, we would have seen some great competition and technology.

[brad0]

and who still sells boards with chrome graphics?

VIA sells boards with Chrome graphics.

[Nille]

VIA sells boards with Chrome graphics.

And who one would buy VIA boards?

[brad0]

And who one would buy VIA boards?

What an irrelevant question. It doesn't matter.

[Rexilion]

And who one would buy VIA boards?

We have these:

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/12454-12454-321959-338927-3640406-5226831.html?dnr=2

[pingufunkybeat]

does it matter?

It does to people who own Chrome chips.

[curaga]

We have these:

[hp link]

If they're used as thin clients, what do they need 3d for?

[Rexilion]

If they're used as thin clients, what do they need 3d for?

We use it with ThinPro (Linux!) and xfreerdp (= freerdp?).

I do not believe these cards are 3D capable. We had issue's hooking these up to two screens. Under those circumstances, the redrawing speeds of these start to go downhill.

But that could be the thinpro not (fully?) supporting the 'color card'. Our external IT supplier mentions that these do not have a graphics card, but a simple color card (no idea what it means).

[Saverios]

For what it's worth, the man is a hero in my book.

A few years ago I was serving my tour of duty and all I had available was an old branded laptop (OEM was Clevo Corp, if anyone cares), which had a Chrome9 chipset. An otherwise decent machine with that horrible, horrible graphics card. I installed opensuse at the time and the only driver which could boot was the framebuffer. Man, even scrolling the file list was slow. Windoze was only marginally better.

Then I found OpenChrome, installed it without much of a hassle and lo and behold! 2D acceleration! Decent performance! A usable system! And they helped me out when I had problems installing the driver.

I didn't find any donation link on the site, so I couldn't help out at the time. The site still doesn't have a donation link, although if anyone knows anything, I think a belated donation would work just as well.

Anyway, I would just like to say a big thank you to Mr. Simmons and his collaborators for all their hard work and allowing me to enjoy the time I spent with that machine.

I hope they are successful in their new endeavour.