On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 05:59:07PM -0700, Gareth Hughes wrote:
> > Fair enough, I just wish you'd be a bit more supportive to those of us who are
> > trying (with very limited resources, mind you) to fix it, as you're probably
> > the man with the single most intimate knowledge of the driver. You don't have
> > to do it yourself, just help us do it. :)
>
>
> What do you want from me? I've spent a long time:
>
> 1) Working on the Utah-GLX driver for the Rage Pro.
>
> 2) Working on the DRI drivers for the Rage 128 (including PPC), G400, V3/V5
> and Radeon.
>
> 3) Trying to get the DRI driver for the Rage Pro working.
>
> Anyone who questions my dedication to this project can take it up with me
> offline -- I'd be more than happy to discuss it with them. As for helping
> you to get the driver working, every bit of work I did is available from the
> CVS repository. Yes, I couldn't get it fully working, but that does not
> mean I didn't try.
I think the mistaken impression is that there's some magic bullet and if
someone "in-the-know" took a look at it the current problems would go
away. That isn't true. All of us have written drivers and we've all hit
this wall at one time or another. The only way to get around it is to
have a lot of perseverance and keep banging your head against the wall
until you make it through. None of us have had time to do that with that.
Gareth made a lot of contributions not only to the RagePro and many
other drivers.
> I think you are missing my point -- having to maintain a driver for a card
> that's four or five generations old as a full-time job just plain sucks
> arse. Doing it as a project in your spare time will most likely be a lot of
> fun, particularly if it's something new. Thus, your efforts to get a driver
> working for the Rage Pro, or adding things to the Rage 128 driver, are quite
> valid and I hope you get something working.
I've said, many times, that you need a diversity of skill levels on a
project. For someone new to a project, anything is interesting, because
they're spending a lot of time learning. As you get more skilled and
you've done it all multiple times, you start to want something new and
different to do instead. It's great when you can get a ratio of
something like one senior person to two or three junior people, because
you get mentoring and everyone gets to do the parts of the project they
are interested in doing. We've done what we can to help guide people,
and we've written a lot of the code, but relaly moving a driver forward
takes a lot of time and everyone has other things to do.
If you're really interested in the graphics field, the DRI is a great
way to get experience. For research purposed you've got an entire OpenGL
stack from top to bottom. Things like WireGL/Chromium (and many other
projects) would be a whole lot harder if they didn't have Mesa available
to build on. If you're interested in working for a vendor these drivers
would get you a chance to write drivers that you'd never have enough
time to do by yourself. You'll also learn that pounding your head
against the wall is normal and a really frustrating part of the process.
- |Daryll
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