Re: [9fans] Cute plan9/inferno client?

["Lawrence E. Bakst" <ml@iridescent.org>]

A few comments.

1. It was a 1 line post to the group. I'm not pushing anything, have no vested interest, I just wanted the list to be aware of it. You don't like Nvida or closed source, that's fine with me. The Tegra is probably one of the best ARM chips out there and certainly the most integrated given the graphics and video hardware it has.

I'll point that companies like TI, that used to hate open source are now converts. Many of the Gumstix Overo modules that seem to be so beloved here, have PowerVR SGX chips on them that are 100% closed source.

2. All previous (to Sandy Bridge) Intel graphics hardware is pretty much junk. It's not very DX capable or OpenGL capable as far as 3D goes. The chips are riddled with bugs. They can't play even simple games and the performance is awful. Last time I checked the 3D portion of the hardware did not seem to be open source and documented, although that might have changed.

3. I don't believe any of the major 3D chips vendors has a fully open source driver That include Nvidia, ATI, S3, and Imagination Technologies. Where fully open source would mean that the compiler and other tools for their shader units, thread dispatchers, and so on is all open source. Or the code that reads the
EDID via DDI/I2c from the monitor.

Actually these chips will never be fully open source because of licensing constraints for things like HDCP and Blu-ray.

leb


At 1:16 PM -0500 1/27/11, erik quanstrom wrote:
> > I deleted a line from the post that said the big issue will be the
>> quality of the hardware doc, if there even is any.  Still, if it ends
>> up running linux there might be some hope.
>
>the problem is that the linux driver guy is generally getting it straight
>from the source, and not from the docs.  so (from experience)
>existence of a linux driver does not imply that there are docs,
>or if there are, a new driver could be written from them.
>
>> I wouldn't rule out getting doc on everything but the 3D unit.  Even
>> in that case, some of Nvidia's 3D GPUs instruction sets have been
>> reverse engineered.
>
>if you have time for that kind of nonsense, go ahead.  there
>are full specs on the intel video hardware, and nobody has
>done a think with that.
>
>> In case you haven't noticed all of the major 3D chips guys are closed
>> source.
>
>ati?
>
>- erik


--
leb@iridescent.org