Yet Another VIA Linux Driver Has Arrived

[mrugiero]

Competition is good. ATI and Nvidia are competitors. Their products regularly leapfrog one another. Intel is almost a competitor, and in some respects (power consumption, die size, CPU integration) they are genuinely threatening Nvidia / ATI with technologies that the first two lack.

VIA and SiS are not competitors, so they don't fall under my general approval of competition. The only thing VIA / SiS have going for them in the graphics space is price -- but you can get pretty darn cheap Nvidia and ATI integrated chips, not to mention Intel, and any of the "big three" have better drivers and more complete OpenGL implementations (closed source or otherwise).

I don't think VIA and SiS have a reason to exist anymore. They may or may not have something to do in the embedded space, CPUs, motherboards, etc. -- but graphics? They should honestly just license Intel GMA or AMD Fusion, and stop embarrassing themselves. They are so far behind the times that they don't have a meaningful competitive advantage along any of the major marketing points (features, performance, cost, power consumption).

And I think OLPC made a huge, huge mistake by using them instead of Intel GMA. The added cost of supporting VIA chips (writing drivers, crippling applications so they run performantly, etc) is not worth the meagre cost savings of using that versus something like GM965.

I think you are wrong. VIA and SiS are competitors, but they are in another economic niche. They are, obviously, the low end, low specs niche, which is useful mostly for, say, administration (in the economic meaning) office of a company. The cheaper, the better, if I'm gonna use just a word processor, I'll look for the cheapest, not for the more FPS. Obviously, if you don't give a proper support, you will eventually lost your clients, specially in a niche which before or later will move to free OS's because of costs reduction. But I don't believe that it is VIA the one which doesn't want to release the source code, I'm almost sure most graphics cards companies pay 3rd party software companies to make the drivers, and then the copyright is owned by a 3rd party. Maybe I'm wrong about it, but it does make sense, VIA being assholes, I hope does not.

[fernandoc1]

Have you ever tried to get something working on a SiS chipset?

Yes, I have.
It is also a trashware, worst than VIA.
They share the same philosophy of being an MS doormat.

[allquixotic]

Competition is good. ATI and Nvidia are competitors. Their products regularly leapfrog one another. Intel is almost a competitor, and in some respects (power consumption, die size, CPU integration) they are genuinely threatening Nvidia / ATI with technologies that the first two lack.

VIA and SiS are not competitors, so they don't fall under my general approval of competition. The only thing VIA / SiS have going for them in the graphics space is price -- but you can get pretty darn cheap Nvidia and ATI integrated chips, not to mention Intel, and any of the "big three" have better drivers and more complete OpenGL implementations (closed source or otherwise).

I don't think VIA and SiS have a reason to exist anymore. They may or may not have something to do in the embedded space, CPUs, motherboards, etc. -- but graphics? They should honestly just license Intel GMA or AMD Fusion, and stop embarrassing themselves. They are so far behind the times that they don't have a meaningful competitive advantage along any of the major marketing points (features, performance, cost, power consumption).

And I think OLPC made a huge, huge mistake by using them instead of Intel GMA. The added cost of supporting VIA chips (writing drivers, crippling applications so they run performantly, etc) is not worth the meagre cost savings of using that versus something like GM965.

[jhansonxi]

Via is one of the worst business I ever seen on the computing space.

Have you ever tried to get something working on a SiS chipset?

[Chewi]

You initially make it sound like this is a totally new driver written from scratch, which it isn't. At least being based on existing code, there is a chance that the work could be unified. I don't really care for VIA hardware but I can say that I've met Daniel Drake and he's a really nice guy. He's also a Gentoo developer.

[fernandoc1]

Via is one of the worst business I ever seen on the computing space. It should be comparable to Microsoft and it's old fashioned business model.
They are all condemned, and should die as soon as possible.
Have they thought that One Laptop per Child is a great social program that helps include poor people on the digital world?
Why VIA can't help them with proper device drivers?
VIA's hardware are one of the worst that I ever seen.
They don't have anything better than Nvidia and ATI to hide.

[mrugiero]

So, one step forward, three steps backwards
Couldn't they just add this support to the openchrome instead of making ANOTHER driver?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Yet Another VIA Linux Driver Has Arrived

VIA's small Linux development community is badly fragmented; there is yet another group of developers creating their own VIA driver. I wish it was a joke, seeing as there are already a number of drivers for the same VIA chipsets and none of them are feature complete or in really great condition, but a new driver has been released. This time the new driver comes from the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) crew and it's just being dubbed xf86-video-chrome. Not only though is there yet another X.Org driver, but it's bringing its own kernel DRM...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTA4MQ