S3 Graphics Fails At Delivering Linux Driver 132
Ashmash writes "Phoronix is running a story about S3 Graphics failing to provide Linux support for their Chrome 500 products even though they have announced in press releases going back months that there is Linux support. S3 Graphics has gone as far as advertising OpenGL 3.0 support for Linux and one of their representatives had promised a driver by last December. This situation has been going on for months, but there is no Linux driver at all for the Chrome 500 series."
WTF. (Score:4, Informative)
If a driver isn't out on day one, there's no way in hell this should be in a press release. I can only hope that it doesn't make it to any of the boxes.
Bullshit like that shouldn't be legal.
Maybe it's time to help out (Score:5, Informative)
It may be time to help out The Unichrome Project [sourceforge.net], which produces a driver that works with the older Unichrome and Chrome9 chipsets.
VIA doesn't have much of a history of helping the open source community with specs or source for its S3 graphics cards.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder though, if their products are any good at all?
The Original Virge considerably predates the existence of nVidia and when it came out there was nothing even close. It didn't really speed anything up, but it gave a substantial boost to visual effects. It actually tended to come at a frame rate penalty vs. software renderers except on the fastest machines.
Unfortunately S3 never really went anywhere after that, tried valiantly to go out of business several times, and mostly produces shitty integrated graphics. I just did a Windows XP install on a system based around an ASUS motherboard with a VIA chipset and S3 integrated graphics. They seem to work, that's about my only experience with them these days. But certainly S3 has no graphics solutions which will impress anyone. They are solidly at the bottom of the budget bin.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think they are really trying to participate in the gaming/high end of graphics, I think they largely still focus on onboard/handheld/as little as needed to work graphics.
Which, they are still pretty damn good at (usually), although you may know them better as VIA.
Re:S3 has always been a synonym for "avoid" (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting. It sounds like Promise's Linux support: they used to publish customized versions of out-of-date versions of Linux patches that re-arranged your drive numbering without telling anyone and coulldn't be applied against any contemporary kernel source tree.
What NVidia publishes is a fascinating attempt to endrun around the GPL licenses. They publish a binary blob kernel driver, which 'taints' your kernel and legally prevents you from being able to publish it as part of your distribution. And for the features to work, they also replace the OpenGL libraries with closed source versions, which do not integrate well with _anyone's_ package management system, because they refuse to publish any RPM, .dep, or other package managed tool for it, nor does their license allow repackaging it and automating installation. If you want the drivers, you're compelled by their license to _manuall_ have each installer sign the agreement.
This is extremely painful in many environments, and leads to some extremely poorly done repackaging of their drivers and libraries for automated installation, and their exclusion form Linux distributions.
Re:Can we not just get fully open specifications? (Score:4, Informative)
We already have that. It's a little company called Intel [intellinuxgraphics.org]
Re:Maybe it's time to help out (Score:3, Informative)
> Why won't they release specs? I know nothing about graphics hardware. Would releasing
> the specs expose them to corporate espionage of some sort?
It might expose them to lawsuits and/or cancellation of licenses. Many of these outfits don't own all of the "IP" in their chips and/or drivers. They license it from other companies and in doing so agree to some truly amazing restrictions.
Re:Let's raise this barn! (Score:3, Informative)
As much as I am skeptical of them, Intel seems to be the only company interested in open source drivers. ATI may be making moves in that direction, too, but I am still waiting for results.
They've actually made very big progress on the release of specifcations, so it's more on the open source side now. The last release of documentation was the R6xx/7xx 3D documentation that arrvied just a few weeks ago, but there's been some demo code released before that. Previously there's been releases of the ISA and various other bits, so people have been working on the drivers for a while. As far as specs is concerned having power management (basic suspend/resume should already be covered, but not during operation for mobile chips etc.) and UVD (hardware decoding of H.264/VC-1). However, all the specs required to write kick-ass 3D acceleration should now be there.
Unfortunately, one of the things messing things up is that the X graphics driver model is undergoing big changes with GEM (kernel graphics memory manager), KMS (kernel mode setting), DRI2 (new direct rendering interface), Gallium3D (low-level API for shaders) and to support hardware acceleration while using a compositing window manager. It's pretty much all necessary to bring the Linux desktop up to speed but it does throw a lot of balls up in the air at once. GEM was introduced in kernel 2.6.28 and is quite new, Gallium3D was just merged to Mesa master and overall most of this only lives in special compile flags and git branches. There's a lot of promise for 2010 but 2009 will be rough waters.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:1, Informative)
The Original Virge considerably predates the existence of nVidia and when it came out there was nothing even close.
the original virge came out in 1995. nvidia was founded in 1993 and put out the nv1 in 1995.
I don't know how you can claim there was nothing close to the original virge, when software rendering would beat it.
there were a host of companies vying to put out 3d cards within the same window of time, including 3dfx (founded 1996), matrox (mystique in 1996), ATI (Rage2 was released in 1996, putting the Rage out in the 1995 time frame), Rendition (V1000 out in 1996), etc..
to suggest that the S3 virge "considerably predates" any of these is misleading, if not false.
Re:Who cares about S3 graphics (Score:1, Informative)
yes i think it can... the S3 Chrome 530GT is about equivalent to a 8400 GS
really they aren't sold as gaming cards they are for HTPCs pretty much video accelerators vs 3D accelerators
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:3, Informative)
The Original Virge considerably predates the existence of nVidia and when it came out there was nothing even close. It didn't really speed anything up, but it gave a substantial boost to visual effects. It actually tended to come at a frame rate penalty vs. software renderers except on the fastest machines.
Yeah - S3 Virge/DX, the video decelerator. I still have one in a box somewhere. In action games you were better off using software rendering, as you'd get more FPS.
Re:S3 is still around? (Score:1, Informative)
Actually the Matrox Millennium, which was released first, crushed the S3 Virge in performance.