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VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

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  • #11
    Originally posted by Sonadow View Post
    Any examples of such drivers in Windows?
    I was thinking about the VMWare drivers for their virtual SVGA hardware. AFAIK they are open source on Linux, proprietary on Windows, but all are Gallium3D-based.
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    • #12
      Originally posted by GreatEmerald View Post
      Interesting. So we sooner saw a proprietary driver on Gallium3D than the Intel open-source one...
      There have been several proprietary gallium drivers, we just don't hear much about them.

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      • #13
        I had a look at the VIA binary driver; it's strictly Ubuntu-only. All the paths are hardcoded to those found in Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions:






        Haven't downloaded the source code from VIA's portal yet but judging by how small the source zipfile is (less than 2mb) im a bit dubious about whether it contains the full stack, and whether it can even compile on a non-Ubuntu system.

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        • #14
          VIA Secretly Has A Working Gallium3D Driver

          Even though it was just a binary blob, I just had to check the date of the article. After all, it's the beginning of April .

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          • #15
            Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
            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.
            I could care also less, but because of completly different reasons, I then dont buy any via hardware in next years, what I did not plan anyway.
            I would have consideres via a bit if that would be opensource, but even than I dont think they build good hardware.

            But I was curious because I thought gallium3d is for free drivers only. because its a bit stupid, when you then have a opensoruce statetracker that enables hardware-independend stuff, that closedsource driver could use that I would think is absurd.

            But then its like bsdish, you give your enemy the sword to kill you, a bit like catolish philosophy ^^.

            But ok... but then another question, nvidia did always make 99% own x-stack because whatever because they suck or something or mesa had the wrong lisense or whatever... so why do neither nvidia nor amd have plans to make better drivers by rewrite their garbage-blobs to gallium? thought its because of this lisences.

            Or do they want to port windows to linux basicly so they dont have to programm 2 different drivers.

            So Ubuntu/Nvidia/Windows/Linux... nice love it (ironie off)

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            • #16
              Now, does VIA/S3 have any compelling products in the works in any market segment that would make anyone consider them a viable alternative?

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              • #17
                Originally posted by blackiwid View Post
                But I was curious because I thought gallium3d is for free drivers only.
                Gallium, and indeed all of Mesa is specifically designed to allow proprietary out-of-tree drivers. I think they are largely trying to attract embedded hardware manufacturers to use mesa, and VMWare/virtual drivers.

                so why do neither nvidia nor amd have plans to make better drivers by rewrite their garbage-blobs to gallium? thought its because of this lisences.
                It's because they put 99% of their focus on the windows drivers, and simply put out quick ports of that code to linux. Rewriting everything into Gallium would take a huge amount of work, probably end up turning Gallium largely into a clone of their already existing internal architecture, and most likely be less optimized anyway, since Gallium is meant to be hardware agnostic and their existing drivers are free to make assumptions about how their hardware works that would be more difficult to add into gallium.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by duby229 View Post
                  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.
                  Maybe it was the Windows Embedded Compact 7 (WEC7) graphics driver.
                  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

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by Nille_kungen View Post
                    Maybe it was the Windows Embedded Compact 7 (WEC7) graphics driver.
                    http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...amd_linux_wec7
                    That one was released in source form though, despite what the article says. We couldn't provide source for the bits supplied by MS, so it's a hybrid license (eg these parts are under this license, those parts are under that license). The reason for basing it on radeon rather than Catalyst was so that we *could* provide source code.
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                    • #20
                      Originally posted by schmidtbag View Post
                      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.
                      So having the driver work in 13.04 doesn't mater to you?

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