OpenChrome DRM Driver For Open-Source VIA Continues To See Some Activity In 2022

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenChrome DRM Driver For Open-Source VIA Continues To See Some Activity In 2022

If you are still using a motherboard with a VIA x86 chipset, it's really long past due to consider upgrading to a newer platform, but if that is not feasible the UniChrome IGP graphics support continues to still be worked on occasionally for Linux in 2022. The OpenChrome driver project remains in a sad state and out-of-tree, but is continuing to see fixes and re-based against newer versions of the Linux kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenChrome-Alive-In-2022

[Quackdoc]

I think I still have a via board kicking around somewherem it was slow, even for when it was new.

[Mike Frett]

All I remember about VIA is all the complaints about its crappy motherboard drivers. Remember how flaky those boards were?

[sinepgib]

I remember having a VIA GPU and interacting with James Simmons via (no pun intended) the mailing list in his efforts to implement KMS. Despite being few, they were a very active and friendly community. I no longer own that computer, but I wish them luck in their efforts. It may not be apt for modern uses but it's still useful for other tasks and I'd rather not see it turn into e-waste.

[dc740]

Oh... I owned several VIA, and SiS machines since that was all my family could afford when I was young. I don't really know if all the knowledge I gathered was increased when trying to make them be usable, or they actually set me back years on pointless tasks that would never lead to anything useful, since there was no way to get 3D acceleration. I have the worst memories of them, and I still look back in anger.

[BingoNightly]

I think I still have a via board kicking around somewherem it was slow, even for when it was new.

I have a C7 Mini-ITX board here from an old NAS build and slow is an apt description.

[xhustler]

Takes me back to my first rig. First year BSC Comp Sci, got my paycheck from an internship gig and bought an old monitor, RAM, power supply, an IDE HDD, a Pentium 4 cpu stripped from an old lab PC, a motherboard with a VIA chipset. Had its issues but it helped me wade into Linux From scratch, cross compiling and a bunch of other stuff.

Hopefully mainlining these drivers will help simplify the journey for a noob who has no access to recent hardware.

[Adarion]

I think I still have a via board kicking around somewherem it was slow, even for when it was new.

Exactly that was the idea. Slow, but also low power and added ASICs where needed for video acceleration and crypto. Small form factor, passively cooled. Neat idea in the days where AMD and intel were giving each other the MHz race with no consideration of power consumption.
Well. It's still okay to use those things, but indeed, today there are architectures with similar power consumption that run circles around these CPUs. Still, if one has them, why not put them to good use if their processing power is still sufficient for the task?

[lepetit]

I have several hardware with via nano in cpu (64 bits).
zotac vd01
samsung nc20
via epia m900

I hope he will continue on this project.
it's a shame too that james simmons is not on this project anymore, i don't know what happened, he was very active though.

[Quackdoc]

Exactly that was the idea. Slow, but also low power and added ASICs where needed for video acceleration and crypto. Small form factor, passively cooled. Neat idea in the days where AMD and intel were giving each other the MHz race with no consideration of power consumption.
Well. It's still okay to use those things, but indeed, today there are architectures with similar power consumption that run circles around these CPUs. Still, if one has them, why not put them to good use if their processing power is still sufficient for the task?

I don't think mine is good for anything at all, I can try and dig it out sometime. but I don't think I could do much with it. these things were so terribly slow at the time, im not even sure I could run a UI on mine even at 480p. and I can't think of any headless tasks it would be useful for lol