On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > > Unfortunately, graphics vendors are notoriously secretive, and none have > been willing to release Sun from our NDAs, so we're not allowed to share > the sources to our drivers for any recent hardware (pretty much anything > made in the past 5-7 years since Sun stopped designing our own and became > simply an OEM of graphics cards from ATI & 3DLabs - including all cards > for the PCI & PCI-Express busses).
Video cards (particularly for PCI) should be pretty cheap now and likely perform better with Xorg than Sun's expensive OEMed cards. How about adopting the approach where one well supported PCI video card design is offered with hardware and open-sourced driver support? Sun could assure a channel (to benefit its customers) by reselling the card for some period of time. Customers obtain continued support and more performance as well. It may be that legacy system firmware may be the main issue here since it needs to be able to draw console text using the new card. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
