Thomas Dodd wrote:
Mesa itself doesn't have any sort of module loading facility.Nicholas Leippe wrote:On Wednesday 18 December 2002 11:20 pm, you wrote:Bettr still. A loadable part of Mesa/ drivers. Have a simple default module that does nothing/ returns an error if S3TC (de)compression is requested. Then someone, out of reach of the patent, can write a version of the module that works. A single C file should work, built against the DRI/XF86/Mesa headers, and it replaces the default version. If at some later date S3/VIA decide we can use it, the infastructure is there. If needed for speed, the code could then be builtin instead of a module. Add in the hooks for a loadable module, is simply preparing for quick implementation when S3/VIA give the go ahead.
On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 08:10:30PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
You have to balance things out. Yes, the US is litiginous, and clearly wayMaybe the proper course of action would be to try to come up with a
too much so. Is the answer to just cower in a hole and hope it passes?
Maybe. And maybe not.
workalike mechanism which doesn't infringe on the patent. For example,
using an approximation of the actual algorithm. I seem to recall that the
S3TC algorithm is basically a simple "store every corner of an NxN square
at full precision and store the gradients at a lower precision"
algorithm...
Also, what about doing hardware-only support, and just breaking for
software fallback? Then it'd be up to the hardware (which ostensibly has a
license) to implement the algorithm.
What about just implementing it as a patch hosted outside the U.S.? Leave the choice up to the users just like with decss.
But I've prototyped some texture compression code and all the "interesting" bits are contained in the texcompress.c file. If someone feels like going out on a limb they could try to flesh out the stubs in that file. There are changes to other files (like texformat.h) that I'm sitting on but could probably be checked in safely. With everything else in place (including minor updates to the DRI driver(s)) someone could probably produce a texcompress.o file that would do the job.
As for talking to S3, the contact I had was apparently a dead end. With all the mergers/spin-offs/acquisitions that S3 has gone through in recent years (Sonic Blue, Via, Diamond, ATI) it's not clear who might even own the patents anymore.
-Brian
PS: I'll be on vacation from Dec 20 - Jan 5 and probably won't be able to do any of the above-mentioned stuff until next year.
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