[Discuss] open source graphics drivers

[jack at coats.org (Jack Coats)]

I had a friend that would purchase 2 new video cards that were not
supported in Linux.  Then go walk the halls at MIT on a Friday or Saturday
night, looking for a electronics/computer geek that he would pay some beer
money plus a "Free" high-end video card for the parameters needed to get
X11 working with it. ... Today cards are more complicated and just finding
scan rates, etc with the graphic processors being as or more powerful than
the CPUs in the systems where they run.  ... Oh yes, my friend would
'release' the specs needed to drive the cards for free on the 'net.

Still, finding energetic young geek or a few, that we could get to do the
reverse engineering right could be a cost effective solution AND support
them in their cyber-geekieness :)


On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 6:39 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com>wrote:

> Martin Owens wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> If that assertion were true then nVidia and ATi would have opened up their
> architectures ten years ago. Instead, the trade secret mentality in both
> companies not only kept most things closed and proprietary but added layers
> of obfuscation to make it extremely difficult to reverse engineer their
> products.
>
>  That's what reverse engineering is about. Learning how the hardware
>> works. It's not perfect, but with enough resources it can be done.
>>
>
> Given what's been discovered from the documents nVidia has released so
> far? It's no where near good, never mind perfect. There's a lot about the
> Kepler architecture and its various implementations that the reverse
> engineers got wrong. Example: the red screen bug which has been frustrating
> developers for something like two years. Not a bug at all. It's a debug
> setting left enabled on some cards at the factory.
>
>  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.
>>
>
> Certainly a contributing factor, but I figure Android and CUDA/OpenCL have
> more to do with it. Steam Machines may be revenue in the future but Android
> and CUDA are revenue today.
>
> By the way, it's Gabe Newell at Valve. John Carmack is over at iD Software
> and Armadillo Aerospace.
>
> --
> Rich P.
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-- 
><> ... Jack

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