Slashdot Log In
VIA Releases FOSS Graphics Driver
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 31, 2008 09:48 PM
from the following-through dept.
from the following-through dept.
billybob2 writes "VIA has released a 113,800 line open source graphics driver with full mode-setting support for CRT, LCD, and DVI devices along with 2D, X-Video, and cursor acceleration. Harald Welte, VIA's open source representative, states that the next step is to add 3D (see preview), TV-out, and hardware codec support while integrating this work with existing open source projects. VIA has pre-installed Linux on a significant portion of the company's latest products, including the EVEREX gPC2, 15.4" gBook, and CloudBook. It has also helped port the open source CoreBoot BIOS (previously LinuxBIOS) to several of its motherboards." VIA seems to be making good on the promise of its open source initiative announced last April.
Related Stories
[+]
Linux: VIA Announces Open Source Driver Initiative 134 comments
Aron Schatz writes "VIA has announced that they will start a new site (http://linux.via.com.tw — doesn't exist yet) specifically for the development of open source drivers. From their press release: 'Over the following months, VIA will work with the community to enable 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration to ensure the best possible Open Source experience on VIA Processor Platforms. 'To further improve cooperation with the community, VIA will also adhere to a regular quarterly release schedule that is aligned with kernel changes and release of major Linux distributions. In addition, beta releases will be issued on the site as needed, and a bug report and tracking feature will also be integrated.' Nvidia should be next."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Talk about a cookbook [youtube.com] answer...
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Not yet, but soon hopefully. As stated in the OP.
It is really cool to see more hardware vendors moving to open source. Drivers are one area where more eyes are needed to help make the bugs shallow.
Parent
I do hope this pans out... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I can trust that VIA video will actually work properly under linux, their boards become considerably more attractive for my purposes. The prospect of coreboot support for such boards would be gravy. I'd love to be able to put together some little linux widgets with linux burned right into the motherboard.
Re:I do hope this pans out... (Score:5, Informative)
Via really has no choice.
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
Atom kills VIA in Price/Performance/Power ratio across the board.
Once Intel fixes the problem of their north bridge requiring 6x the power Atom does then via is in really big trouble
It's interesting to see via go from ruling the mini-ITX market to now desparately having to play catchup in such a short time.
Parent
Re:I do hope this pans out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Via really has no choice.
Agreed, everyone except for nVidia and maybe Matrox (side note: what a shitty company) is opening their specs.
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
It sucks up 22W+ by itself though, and is very old. It's nothing compared to the VX800 or CN896.
Atom kills VIA in Price/Performance/Power ratio across the board.
-Price: Maybe. If you just want entry-level options (ie bare to the bone) and don't care about power usage, it's definately cheaper. Normal VIA parts are sold like boutique items. Except, strangely, their mATX boards go for 50$.
-Performance: Definately not, now that Nano has been released (but damnit sell 'em at retail!).
-Power ration: What? Nano desktop parts are what people have been measuring. Typical ULV C7s are like 4W-7W. Considering you get a chipset that ranges in that wattage too, and this is honest counting unlike Intel, VIA certainely has the upper hand.
Not to mention they don't need a P4 connector...
Once Intel fixes the problem of their north bridge requiring 6x the power Atom does then via is in really big trouble
Unlikely. Intel does not want to lose Celeron sales for the Atom. So their miniITX boards remain crap so they can sell whatever 945G boards they have left over that failed their low-voltage tests.
It's interesting to see via go from ruling the mini-ITX market to now desparately having to play catchup in such a short time.
I wouldn't call it catch up, but it's nice to see Intel and VIA compete. The only thing is I hope it drives down the price of VIA parts, at least within the 90$-150$ range, otherwise it's been a waste of time.
Parent
Re:I do hope this pans out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then something happened. I don't know what: brain-slugs, possibly. They yanked everything, even the specs for older hardware, and stopped communicating. What a bunch of dicks.
Parent
Re: Matrox (Score:5, Informative)
On top of that, they fell behind badly in terms of performance, and the great signal quality from their cards is mostly meaningless in the age of DVI.
Looks almost like a case of corporate suicide, as in "nobody can be THAT stupid, so it must be intentional" ;-).
Parent
Re:I do hope this pans out... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:I do hope this pans out... (Score:5, Informative)
The intel 945G chipset for Atom is fully documented and has quite good open source 3d drivers.
Our company works with almost a dozen hardware vendors, and none of them are so hard to work with and so open source hostile as intel. Try getting the documentation for the RAM controller of the chipset you mentioned.
Parent
I'm sorry, what did you just say? (Score:3, Interesting)
Atom kills VIA in Price/Performance/Power ratio across the board.
Once Intel fixes the problem of their north bridge requiring 6x the power Atom does then via is in really big trouble
?? Didn't someone just do a watt/performance comparison of the atom _platform_ against an amd64, and it lost in both wattage and performance?!
I doubt if Intel would improve their northbridge much as they don't want this to be a viable platform against their celerons.
Re:Might already be there, depending on purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
wtf are you on about, why would a firewall need a fast blit ?
I would guess you don't know shit about what a vga card does.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Even a server or firewall needs some configuration. With the driver VIA has just released, there is an Open Source driver that can display text and 2D graphics. Which will do nicely for a typical GUI (Ubuntu?), so you are not limited to the console.
Re:Might already be there, depending on purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to say it, but do you understand the concept of a firewall? You know, a hardened box running the minimum software necessary to inspect and pass/stop traffic?
Typically, it does not include a gui for a pretty interface.
Just saying.
Parent
Almost unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Not saying they did such GPL crime but, if you look at https://www.helixcommunity.org/ [helixcommunity.org] , don't you feel it is a bit surreal?
Such things happen. I call it "nerd coup" ;)
Re:Almost unbelievable (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously their motive is profit. They went the route of stealing code (although that might not have been management, just some rogue coder taking the easy way out) and it didn't work. VIA understands that there is a large and growing Linux community and that there is money to be made from being Linux-friendly.
Just because their motive isn't selfless doesn't mean Linux supporters shouldn't welcome VIA with open arms. This is the sort of support we've wanted for many years.
Parent
Re:Almost unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they wronged the open source community in the past, maybe they didn't (I personally don't know). Let's show them that we are forgiving of past mistakes and fully welcome them and their donated code into the FOSS world. They made things right, let's not dwell on the past.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They made things right, let's not dwell on the past.
I'm trapped in the past, you insensitive clod!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
They made things right, let's not dwell on the past.
I'm trapped in the past, you insensitive clod!
Then for you it's the present, stop complaining.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Windows 95? He's still on DOS 3.3, you insensitive clod!
Re:Almost unbelievable (Score:5, Insightful)
It is likely they went through a process of discovery. The discovered that keeping the software open source has very little impact upon maintaining competitive advantage on the hardware or making innovative leaps in hardware design and keeping those proprietary. For hardware producers, software is just another overhead and working to minimise that cost makes sense.
There is a real push to achieve low cost ubiquitous computing, UMPC's, smartphone/PDA etc. and every cost saving makes it far more achievable and obviously maintains reasonable profit margins for the hardware manufacturers.
At the moment hardware manufacturers find their profit margins squeezed while their products are carrying closed source proprietary software with 10 times the profit margin, it makes absolutely no business sense as a hard ware manufacturer to put up with this. I am sure most hardware manufacturers thought that M$'s idea of free hardware and 'renting' the software was a load of B$.
Parent
Re:Almost unbelievable (Score:4, Interesting)
The discovered that keeping the software open source has very little impact upon maintaining competitive advantage on the hardware or making innovative leaps in hardware design and keeping those proprietary
I've made it a point to mention the open source driver problem in just about every other e-mail to my Via rep. My guess is a few hundred other developers were doing the same thing. I've also made it a point to express gratitude on each win. Yes, it's good for them, they should have done it anyway, but it's going to make my life a bunch easier too.
Parent
Re:Almost unbelievable (Score:4, Insightful)
If they open source the drivers, there's a chance that they can cut costs - there's a significant chance someone _else_ (redhat, suse, ubuntu, etc) might end up doing the work of keeping the drivers for the _old_ hardware working with the various Linux kernels out there.
Then their in-house coders can do the presumably more "interesting" stuff like write drivers for the newer hardware (esp pre-release hardware - in the initial stages you might end up having to change specs, after release you can send it to the open source bunch).
Parent
Now show them why OSS is good (Score:5, Insightful)
As an act of faith, we should build something cool out of this - not to mention promote them to non-gaming computer users.
If we can optimize a graphics driver or do new things with it, they can sell more hardware and everybody wins. God knows ATI isn't making any money off of their drivers.
Hopefully we can use this to drive the point home.
Re:Now show them why OSS is good (Score:5, Insightful)
But the question is, what?
Parent
Re:Now show them why OSS is good (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, I think a simple start would be to come up with a nice polished compiz theme and desktop (like a good avant [wikipedia.org] dock with some nice icons) that uses this driver to its fullest. We are now at the point where a Linux Desktop can look as good as, if not better than, Windows or the Mac.
Give the average Joe Bloggs a PC running Linux that is relatively immune to viruses and auto-updates Firefox, Flash, Java, GNOME/KDE and VLC when its not being used and you have one happy computer user.
Build computers that use VIA chipsets for all the family that you run tech support for and lets start driving Linux adoption up! The drivers are here.
Parent
Arrghhhh (Score:5, Informative)
Now, a year later, nVidia is looking ridiculous by clinging to closed-source binary drivers while the rest of the industry (including ATi, for pete's sake) go open. And the fact that freaking VIA is more open than nVidia really makes me feel...frustrated. Sorry nVidia, but I can't recommend you as long as you lag like this.
Re:Arrghhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, there are several companies doing that already, never mind.
I buy graphics cards for their hardware, and I expect the software to utilize the hardware as best it can, and if anyone can help with that and with fixing bugs etc then all the better.
On the specific point of arguing "IP" politics though, do you honestly think the world has better graphics hardware right now because of the closed nature of graphics drivers? Because guess what, it's usually competition which spurs the development of better technology, competition which drives innovation in the world, so to tell me with a straight face that without the secrecy and closed nature of Nvidia's and ATI's graphics drivers, graphics technology would be further behind than if it were more open and there was more competition for making better hardware instead of screwing around with driver secrecy, that'd be a feat. I believe that most all patents and secrecy now days is nothing but harmful. In a world that's so inter-connected, there are very few examples I can find for justifying monopolies on ideas. They most always serve only to make the rich richer and poor poorer. (See Microsoft's patent FUD, for example, and try to tell me that did any good for the rest of the world.)
Parent
Re:Arrghhhh (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole argument for FOSS 3D video card drivers is just silly in my opinion. Very very very few people have the skills necessary to write good drivers for these chips (others can learn, but that takes months or years to do). The people who write these drivers do it as a full time job, and the drivers are some of the most important IP in a graphics card (if they were released under a gpl like license, it would be much easier for a new competitor to develop a product).
What about the SuSE radeonhd developers? They work full time. You speak as if programming 3D graphics is rocket science. It is rocket science, if you don't have the specs. Otherwise, it would have been done YEARS ago.
Parent
Re:Arrghhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
And in five years' time, when they've stopped supporting your card in the latest kernel version, you do what?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
And in five years' time, when they've stopped supporting your card in the latest kernel version, you do what?
I have a new card in my gaming rig and buy the cheapest discrete card I can for my alt? No wait, that doesn't fit the slashdot agenda. A laptop then, well then maybe I'll stick with the latest supported distro for that kernel version which should hopefully give it another three years of distro support. After that if it's not broken in eight years, maybe I could oh say stick with it and realize it probably doesn't run the latest eyecandy anyway? Or use the open source nv driver that'll give me an unaccelerat
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a reason why you don't run old distros, you don't want to get behind for other packages, and then get wacked by vulnerabilities in your browser.
Some of us can't add in new cards when the old one goes unsupported. What about those of us with those slimline PCs OEMs love? nVidia/ATI is going to make me a PCI HD3450?
Please.
Free software drivers are the most important aspect of a free software kernel. Linux without radeon/intel/nv/radeonhd is not worth using. So fucking what if it means I only get 2D ac
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Arrghhhh (Score:4, Interesting)
Good for you. For me, I dropped $600+ on two cards in order to drive 4 monitors - all based on this supposedly great support they had for linux.
The drivers didn't effing work and the 'support' was completely worthless, little better than "did you plug in the cable" level.
I had to pay another ~$200 for two gefen "dvi doctors" in order to fix an obvious bug in nvidia's driver, a bug I could have fixed myself faster than it would have taken to recompile the drivers if I had source.
Three years later, their drivers still lag without full support for randr.
Your personal experience doesn't mean shit.
Parent
never forget quack.exe (Score:5, Informative)
It was found that renaming quake.exe to quack.exe
would affect performance. The reason is that the
driver purposely degrades the quality for stuff
that is used in benchmarks. This is dishonest, and
it is a filthy hack. It's damn obvious why video
drivers are a major cause of crashes; they dig
around in kernel memory (totally undocumented) to
enable dirty hacks.
Open Source fixes this problem automatically.
Parent
Kernel debugging; "intellectual property" (Score:3, Interesting)
The whole argument for FOSS 3D video card drivers is just silly in my opinion. Very very very few people have the skills necessary to write good drivers for these chips
Here's how the Ubuntu restricted drivers installer explained it to me: If the developers of other kernel or X components can't use their debuggers to trace execution through a kernel module (or a user-mode process that has equivalent hardware access to the kernel), they can't provide support for a system that includes such a module, other than "go back to VESA". So it isn't as much a license issue as the ability to see what the code is doing and how it is interacting with other code on the same machine; eve
Alt-Left-Click Message on Everex 7" Laptop (Score:3, Insightful)
done a dozen years ago (Score:3, Informative)
Some way for X to detect that there is no way for a window to fit on the screen and add some scrolly bars to it to make everything accessible. Perhaps it's purely the fault of the window manager or library though and not X, or maybe it's both?
The original FVWM ("Feeble Virtual Window Manager") did this. FVWM is still a rather nice window manager, assuming you don't mind editing ~/.fvwmrc to adjust it.
VIA has to support Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
VIA is actually in the embedded x86 space. Home routers, MIDs, and other appliance-like consumer devices seem to be appropriate uses of VIA's chips. Companies there are mainly using Linux(there are exceptions), so I don't see any other choice for VIA but to start improving their Linux support and releasing open source drivers. VIA's cpus can't really compete with normal consumer desktops. Intel's integrated graphics and low power cpus are much more capable, but not as cheap or quite as low power (yet).
Now 4 drivers? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this now brings the total drivers for the Chrome chipset to 4. There's already:
- Via proprietary binary drivers (support some 3D acceleration and TVout, but only available for specific distro/kernel combinations)
- Unichrome drivers (focus on code quality rather than features, so no 3D accel and TVout)
- Openchrome drivers (used in most distros, support some of the features, but imperfect and seem not to support Compiz)
- The new Via FOSS drivers (2D only at present)
Why couldn't VIA just contribute to one of the existing projects or send them docs and maybe funding? That would have been truely embracing open source.
I'd be interested to know if Via tried to contact any of the uni/openchrome developers.
Re:Uh, Via, makes gfx cards? Why that is NEWS to m (Score:5, Informative)
simply the fact that one of the largest video chipset manufacturers in the world is writing open source drivers is huge, and an awesome step forward for linux and foss in general
not everything related to the phase "video card" is about pcie cards in sli and their crysis benchmark
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I could be wrong, but I thought most via cards were integrated into the motherboard. Meaning that you're not going to find a discrete card.
By your logic the fact that you can't find Intel cards at newegg would nullify an article about an Intel graphics chipset that doesn't suck.
I sincerely hope that being the only closed driver provider, that nVidia will follow, Intel, AMD and apparently Via's lead and provide open drivers.
Re:I found VIA sub par! (Score:5, Funny)
The only problem on my part is that I find VIA products mediocre when it comes to gaming.
Well, what do you expect from an integrated video card? They're hardly speed demons.
Parent
Re:VIA stuff doesn't support 720p or 1080i (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait, what?
NTSC ending doesn't mean we'll all be watching 720/1080. It means everything is digital, MPEG2 streams. We're all a looong way off from HDTV-to-the-door.
Their chipsets can certainly do 1080p. Look at the CN400.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing that's going away is over-the-air NTSC (and only analog at that; NTSC's resolution will come over the air digitally, not just HD). It'll be coming out of cable and satellite dish boxes for quite some time now, even if those devices are transitioning to direct digital out over HDMI.
Or that's my understanding of it, anyways. I haven't watched TV in several years now, if you don't count the BSG torrents.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, pretty much.
But I've had a lot of channels cut from the analog plan due to a shitty cable co, so I'm pretty much stuck with their digital plan.
OTA transmissions in Ottawa are no good. If you live in Toronto/Buffalo you're one lucky SOB, because you've got all the channels you could want in 720p/1080i for free and unencrypted. For me, not so much.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Linux is getting hugely popular on the low cost laptop scene here in Asia. When you overhear the average person on the street discussing the benefits of Ubuntu (or whatever) over Apple or Microsoft, it is safe to say that these latter two entities are no longer nearly as relevant as they once were.
If VIA didn't do anything about this they would absolutely lose out big time to the competition. People want cheap, they don't want to buy hardware and then have to pay more than it cost just for the operating sys
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong segment of the market son. VIA aren't catering to the likes of you, they are aiming for laptops and embedded SOHO stuff. This is a far more lucrative area for their business model. I don't know that they even want to compete on the cutting edge with NVidia. I'm sure they certainly have the financial capacity to do so if they desired anyway, but the market is not screaming out for dual DVI setups just yet.