Clarifications On Poulsbo's Gallium3D Driver

[mgc8]

Originally Posted by zoomblab

I don't care much whether my drivers are closed or open. I just want them to be solid.
Interestingly, in that regard, I think that if all drivers were closed, the kernel developers would be forced to keep stable ABI and APIs. That in turn would mean that I wouldn't have to pray for everything to work as well as before whenever I have to upgrade to a new distro version. It would also mean that the drivers are developed by the same entity that made the hardware in the first place and not some random guy from another organization.

And it would also mean that you'd be running Windows instead of Linux. Seriosuly, what's the point of a free OS if the drivers are closed-source?! Just look at the kernel source, more than half of that is drivers! If all of that was closed-source, you'd be left with a pathetic shim of a kernel that wouldn't deserve to be called "open" or "free". Open-source drivers are a prerequisite for a free OS -- if you don't care, you can certainly use any of the alternatives which follow different philosophies.

All this crap about "intellectual property" when it comes to a silly little piece of code that does basic interfacing is aggravating. Yes, custom drivers with performance-optimized features are useful in specific areas like 3D, however keeping it all secret is just corporate paranoia. But what if their competitors found out about...? guess what, they already know all there is to know. You're just screwing legitimate customers.

@Max Spain -- you said it!

[jonwil]

Knowing how anti-open source Imagination are, I doubt that even if Intel said "we guarantee to purchase/make a million PowerVR chips (i.e. pay royalties for a million PowerVR cores) but only if you will open your specs", it wouldn't be enough to make Imagination open up.

[Apopas]

Originally Posted by mgc8

And it would also mean that you'd be running Windows instead of Linux. Seriosuly, what's the point of a free OS if the drivers are closed-source?! Just look at the kernel source, more than half of that is drivers! If all of that was closed-source, you'd be left with a pathetic shim of a kernel that wouldn't deserve to be called "open" or "free". Open-source drivers are a prerequisite for a free OS -- if you don't care, you can certainly use any of the alternatives which follow different philosophies.

All this crap about "intellectual property" when it comes to a silly little piece of code that does basic interfacing is aggravating. Yes, custom drivers with performance-optimized features are useful in specific areas like 3D, however keeping it all secret is just corporate paranoia. But what if their competitors found out about...? guess what, they already know all there is to know. You're just screwing legitimate customers.

@Max Spain -- you said it!

Exactly!

[Dard]

Personally, I really like to use open source drivers, but if any CS drivers are good, I am willing to use them, even though I would rather use an open source driver.

However, the current Poulsbo driver is pretty much the ultimate example against CS drivers you can find.
Usable only on one kernel version, either VESA slow and stable or fast and totally unstable. (with MigrationHeuristic greedy it crashes every time I wake up my notebook from suspend)
And I don't even care about any 3D. Sure, it's nice, but not necessary. But even 2D is buggy.
And you can't even ask anybody, because there is no support on either Linux or Windows. Oh yeah, Windows, the drivers there are also bad. I only tried to run two very old games on it, one using OpenGL and one DirectX. The DirectX one didn't run correctly and there isn't even OpenGL anywhere to be found.

So, the Poulsbo drivers are really a mess and it looked like it would never change.

Now there is information that things may improve.
I had already given up hope that there would be a fixed driver for Poulsbo on Linx *ever*!
Right now I am happy for every support, being closed or open source. If I get *something* I will not complain that I don't get *everything*.

If it will ever get so far, I will not complain anymore. Maybe we get a working 3D driver, maybe we don't. If the CS driver is good, I will use it. If it isn't, I won't. There are a lot of very good CS drivers out there, so "Closed Source" and "good" doesn't have to be mutally exclusive.
Right now I don't have the choice, I have to use a bad driver. Hopefully at least the 2D will get better.

All I'm trying to say is: Those were mostly good news. Don't make it sound too bad.

[gururise]

Any news on when we will see a release version of this? Perhaps the Moblin people have a timeline as to when it will be included in Moblin!? I've been dying to try Mobilin on my new Atom Z530 netbook.