[Discuss] open source graphics drivers

[doctormo at gmail.com (Martin Owens)]

On Tue, 2013-10-29 at 16:19 -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> The single most significant roadblock is lack of 
> documentation.

We don't get to act on that. We can hope on it, but writing better
drivers is more convincing to a company than sitting on ones hands.

> All the developers in the world together can't write a 
> working driver if they don't know how the hardware works.

That's what reverse engineering is about. Learning how the hardware
works. It's not perfect, but with enough resources it can be done.

> nVidia is notorious for providing nothing in terms of documentation or
> support.

I don't need Linus to give nVidia two fingers, I've been saluting to
them a long time too.

> That's recently started changing but now it's the ARM SoC OEMs 
> refusing to release documentation.

I wonder how much of the softening has been Valve's John Carmack poking
their CEO in the ribs about his awful yet good proprietary drivers.

Well we hope... and also act a bit too. Driver testing is always useful.

Martin,