Solution to SGI code in closed 3D drivers? (was Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream)
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 XGI previously had this problem, and I suspect VIA is having the same problem now. They want to release the code to their 3D driver, but it's based on a version of the OpenGL sample implementation licensed from SGI. However, the SI has since been released under some sort of open-source license. My guess is that it wouldn't be a huge amount of work (though not trivial either) to rebase the driver on the open-source version of the SI. Even if it only partially works, this would allow release of the driver code without license concerns. Just a thought... -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkpndDMACgkQX1gOwKyEAw9OdQCfd+irBdrNlcqU0+7YmQlKd8/N A+kAn0aucz6RfGHywjyCIKvOQ5vUIcd2 =Q4yd -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Hello Robert: I appreciate the efforts that VIA is making towards supporting their customers. I have had users asking me for hardware acceleration with VIA chips in FreeBSD for a while now. Many users will be satisfied with a good hardware accelerated 2D solution. A 3D driver is certainly a nice feature to have and I wonder if it might be possible for VIA to release partial source code for their 3D driver that doesn't include the 3rd party code. That might at least give a good starting point for a complete open driver. I realize that the 3rd party code might be too invasive for that to be possible. I would hope that VIA will be focusing it's resources on providing accurate documentation and hopefully code for currently shipping and future chips. It is difficult with limited resources to go back and change the past. Thank you very much for your understanding. Can I suggest to start with X opensource with 3D HW acceleration? Allow us to make it done step by step. Thanks and Best Regards = Bruce C. Chang(張祖明) VIA Technologies, Inc. Address: 1F, 531, Chung-Cheng Road, Hsin-Tien, 231 Taipei Tel: +886-2-22185452 Ext 7323 Mobile: +886-968343824 Fax: +886-2-22186282 Skype: Bruce.C.Chang Email: brucech...@via.com.tw -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Hello Jerome, Keith: It's hard to review if the interface is sane without knowing what userspace might need or not. Maybe VIA can provide some userspace code without putting together an entire driver. Can I suggest to verify the DRM source with the X driver which we will release within 1 month? Thanks and Best Regards = Bruce C. Chang(張祖明) VIA Technologies, Inc. Address: 1F, 531, Chung-Cheng Road, Hsin-Tien, 231 Taipei Tel: +886-2-22185452 Ext 7323 Mobile: +886-968343824 Fax: +886-2-22186282 Skype: Bruce.C.Chang Email: brucech...@via.com.tw -Original Message- From: Jerome Glisse [mailto:gli...@freedesktop.org] Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 8:44 PM To: Harald Welte Cc: Dave Airlie; Benjamin Pan (Fremont); Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 13:37 +0200, Harald Welte wrote: [...] So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? It's hard to review if the interface is sane without knowing what userspace might need or not. Cheers, Jerome Glisse -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Hello All: I understand the requirement. If we submitted for mainline when everything is ready, I believe it takes very long time. Some of you might know that VIA has been trying to support community by releasing doc, source and submit for upstream step by step. As Harald point out, the docs has been hosted in x.org, 2D source code has been released in public domain. We are now preparing our new 2D source which need DRM support for the 3D HW acceleration for EXA and will release it in public domain within 1 month too. I believe it can be a good start for the DRM verification. It's my understanding community people always welcome people to contribute to community. VIA is starting and is on the way to contribute for better user experience. Maybe VIA is not doing perfect yet now, but I hope we can be encouraged for more contribution to the community. VIA will base on the feedback and keep improving. Please give us time and please don't keep VIA away from the openning way. Thanks and Best Regards = Bruce C. Chang(張祖明) VIA Technologies, Inc. Address: 1F, 531, Chung-Cheng Road, Hsin-Tien, 231 Taipei Tel: +886-2-22185452 Ext 7323 Mobile: +886-968343824 Fax: +886-2-22186282 Skype: Bruce.C.Chang Email: brucech...@via.com.tw -Original Message- From: zaj...@gmail.com [mailto:zaj...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 1:23 AM To: Uros Nedic Cc: Harald Welte; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; Benjamin Pan (Fremont) Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream W dniu 19 lipca 2009 18:57 użytkownik Uros Nedic ur...@live.com napisał: If there are small amount of people with enough knowledge to write device drivers, let AMD, VIA, Intel and others make some small one week school and call people from this community to teach them how to do that. This way total cost of writing drivers will be significantly lower (each company should donate some money for this school, and to teach community members) and for return people from community will be educated to do that. It is win-win position - companies get drivers, community gets knowledge. I'm one of the first who would like to write drivers as part of my practice in programming. It is not up to me do decide how my programmer skills are, but I have MSc in Telecommunications Engineering, and also I had many hardware/software oriented exams. I believe for myself that I'm skilled programmer but I'm lacking of knowledge about X Window System, DRI, Gallium3D. To be worse I cannot find any satisfying literature on the Net to start learning. I'm not talking about some 'Tutorials' or 'Introductions' but about some documents where I could understand deeply how it is organized and how to write high quality drivers. I totally agree. Drivers development is really undocumented :/ I have problems understanding how DDX (modesetting) driver works, and most answers I have to get from IRC, not Google. I'm totaly scared of any 3D or even Xv programming. Add the fact that code also lacks documentation and it's extremly hard for some newbie to dig into that. Would be great if someone could document all that, but it seems noone is interested in that. Ppl how already understand that focus on coding, not documenting :/ -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 11:52 +0800, brucech...@via.com.tw wrote: Hello All: I understand the requirement. If we submitted for mainline when everything is ready, I believe it takes very long time. Some of you might know that VIA has been trying to support community by releasing doc, source and submit for upstream step by step. As Harald point out, the docs has been hosted in x.org, 2D source code has been released in public domain. We are now preparing our new 2D source which need DRM support for the 3D HW acceleration for EXA and will release it in public domain within 1 month too. I believe it can be a good start for the DRM verification. It's my understanding community people always welcome people to contribute to community. VIA is starting and is on the way to contribute for better user experience. Maybe VIA is not doing perfect yet now, but I hope we can be encouraged for more contribution to the community. VIA will base on the feedback and keep improving. Please give us time and please don't keep VIA away from the openning way. I appreciate the efforts that VIA is making towards supporting their customers. I have had users asking me for hardware acceleration with VIA chips in FreeBSD for a while now. Many users will be satisfied with a good hardware accelerated 2D solution. A 3D driver is certainly a nice feature to have and I wonder if it might be possible for VIA to release partial source code for their 3D driver that doesn't include the 3rd party code. That might at least give a good starting point for a complete open driver. I realize that the 3rd party code might be too invasive for that to be possible. I would hope that VIA will be focusing it's resources on providing accurate documentation and hopefully code for currently shipping and future chips. It is difficult with limited resources to go back and change the past. robert. Thanks and Best Regards = Bruce C. Chang(張祖明) VIA Technologies, Inc. Address: 1F, 531, Chung-Cheng Road, Hsin-Tien, 231 Taipei Tel: +886-2-22185452 Ext 7323 Mobile: +886-968343824 Fax: +886-2-22186282 Skype: Bruce.C.Chang Email: brucech...@via.com.tw -Original Message- From: zaj...@gmail.com [mailto:zaj...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 1:23 AM To: Uros Nedic Cc: Harald Welte; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; Benjamin Pan (Fremont) Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream W dniu 19 lipca 2009 18:57 uytkownik Uros Nedic ur...@live.com napisa: If there are small amount of people with enough knowledge to write device drivers, let AMD, VIA, Intel and others make some small one week school and call people from this community to teach them how to do that. This way total cost of writing drivers will be significantly lower (each company should donate some money for this school, and to teach community members) and for return people from community will be educated to do that. It is win-win position - companies get drivers, community gets knowledge. I'm one of the first who would like to write drivers as part of my practice in programming. It is not up to me do decide how my programmer skills are, but I have MSc in Telecommunications Engineering, and also I had many hardware/software oriented exams. I believe for myself that I'm skilled programmer but I'm lacking of knowledge about X Window System, DRI, Gallium3D. To be worse I cannot find any satisfying literature on the Net to start learning. I'm not talking about some 'Tutorials' or 'Introductions' but about some documents where I could understand deeply how it is organized and how to write high quality drivers. I totally agree. Drivers development is really undocumented :/ I have problems understanding how DDX (modesetting) driver works, and most answers I have to get from IRC, not Google. I'm totaly scared of any 3D or even Xv programming. Add the fact that code also lacks documentation and it's extremly hard for some newbie to dig into that. Would be great if someone could document all that, but it seems noone is interested in that. Ppl how already understand that focus on coding, not documenting :/ -- Robert Noland rnol...@2hip.net 2Hip Networks -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On 201, 07 20, 2009 at 03:38:32PM +0200, Thomas Hellstr?m wrote: Hi! It appears that GPL'd DRM drivers for closed-source user-space clients are becoming more common, and the situation appears to be causing a lot of unnecessary work from people wanting their drivers in the mainstream kernel. Arguments against pushing upstream include. * Security. * User space interface validation and maintainability. * Politics Why should linux kernel developers care about these drivers at all ? * If such driver is accepted it immediately puts compatibility burden on drm developers without any gain for them. * Users are still on mercy of binary blob supplier. Will this blob run on arm ? Or powerpc ? Or even x86_64 ? Will it be compatible with XOrg X.Y ? Nobody knows that and there is no gain for users too. Security: I think from a security point of view, open docs and a thorough documented security analysis by the driver writer should be sufficient. This should include: 1. In what ways can the GPU access random system pages and how is user-space prevented from doing that in the driver? 2. In what ways can the GPU transfer random user data into its own privileged command stream and, if relevant, how is that prevented in the driver? 3. Is the driver capable of maintaining video memory ownership and protecition? (Currently not a requirement) 4. How is user-space prevented from causing the kernel driver to do unlimited allocations of kernel resources, like buffer objects or references to them. I really don't think an open-source user-space client can add much more to this. It can perhaps be used to detect obvious big security flaws but that should be apparent also from the open docs and the security analysis. User-space interface: Historically driver-specific interfaces have really been up to the driver writer and when posted for review they receive very little comments unless there are things like 64/32 bit incompatibilities etc, but as mentioned on the list, small programs that demonstrate the use of all interface functions would be desirable, and very helpful if someone decides to do write an open-source driver. Politics: It's true that sometimes some people don't like the code or what it does. But when this is the underlying cause of NAK-ing a driver I think it's very important that this is clearly stated, instead of inventing various random reasons that can easily be argued against. How should the driver writer otherwise get it right? Man-years might be spent fixing up drivers that will never get upstream anyway. I think it would help a lot of there was a documented set of driver features that were required and sufficient for a DRM driver to go upstream. It could look something like * Kernel coding style obeyed. Passing checkpatch. * short description of underlying driver architecture (GEM / TTM / Traditional) and future plans * Security analysis according to the above. * Open user-space source exercising all functions of the driver or fully open docs. * User-space interface description and relation to future plans. Thanks, /Thomas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line unsubscribe linux-kernel in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
* fully functional GPL user-space driver. How can you argue that something as tailor made as a DRM interface can be used without it being a derived work? Our prior policy has been to reject such stuff (both the Intel wireless driver regulatory daemon and the GMX driver) -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Christoph Hellwig wrote: I think you're just trying to push your agenda. I think you're just trying to defend your business writing closed source drivers. Drivers that aren't usable without binary blobs don't have a business in the kernel tree, and your whining doesn't help it. You'd be better off spending your time getting proper open drivers done than defending doing the work to support closed binaries. You obviously got all this completely wrong. I avoid writing closed source drivers whenever I can, I'm not whining and I'm not trying to push any of them. The code VIA is trying to submit has not been written by me nor anybody I know. All VIA code I and the companies I've worked for has written is open-sourced and contributed to the Openchrome / mesa / drm project. The point I'm trying to make is the following: If the common agreement of the linux community is to *NOT* allow these drivers in, so be it, then be honest and go ahead and tell the driver writers. Don't make them respin their development trying to fix minor flaws when their driver won't get in anyway! /Thomas -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Peter Zijlstra wrote: On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 15:38 +0200, Thomas Hellström wrote: Politics: It's true that sometimes some people don't like the code or what it does. But when this is the underlying cause of NAK-ing a driver I think it's very important that this is clearly stated, instead of inventing various random reasons that can easily be argued against. How should the driver writer otherwise get it right? Man-years might be spent fixing up drivers that will never get upstream anyway. I think it would help a lot of there was a documented set of driver features that were required and sufficient for a DRM driver to go upstream. It could look something like * Kernel coding style obeyed. Passing checkpatch. * fully functional GPL user-space driver. How can you argue that something as tailor made as a DRM interface can be used without it being a derived work? FWIW my full vote goes against allowing such thing to happen, and I think quite a lot of kernel people would agree with me. I would hope enough of of them would so that we can stop this from happening. Negative karma points to you for trying to chip away at the spirit of As stated before this was a suggestion to clarify the field for driver writers. If the documented set of driver features required is fully open-source so be it. Just let people know. /Thomas Linux. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
If the common agreement of the linux community is to *NOT* allow these drivers in, so be it, then be honest and go ahead and tell the driver writers. Don't make them respin their development trying to fix minor flaws when their driver won't get in anyway! The existing policy based on what has been rejected is: - If you have something which only works with some non-free tightly integrated software then we don't accept it Examples - GMX500, Intel wireless regulatory daemon. So until there is an open source user and test case for the kernel code it has no place in the kernel (and indeed if the two are closely interconnected and dependent then there are good 'talk to your lawyer' reasons as well) Once there is a useful combination of kernel/user space free software for the card then it makes sense to look at a merge. Until then you don't even know what the final interface will look like and what is actually needed kernel side. The VIA stuff might be a useful basis for that work but that is a when/if anyone ever writes drivers for it. My guess is that if someone cares enough about the hardware they need to get EXA working along with 2D render, then submit the bits the need to do hardware rendering. After that tackle what is needed for 3D - as is happening with the Nvidia drivers and then submit a DRM module for their work. Alan -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 04:52:26PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: I think tightly integrated could do with some clarification here. qcserial was accepted despite not being functional without a closed userspace component - an open one's since been rewritten to allow it to work. Do we define tightly integrated as likely to cross the GPL line (potentially the case with Poulsbo, not the case with qcserial), or is it a pragmatic issue? What about specialised hardware drivers that only have closed applications? Greg still claims that qcserial could be used by rebooting from Windows, right? In that it would still be extremly borderline to me, but it's settled now. We also have various SCSI HBA drivers that can be used just fine, but contain tons ot ioctls for management tools that aren't available as open source (or even easily obtainable at all). Personally I don't think we should merge those unless we have userspace code available freely, but it's a less urgent issue than merging drivers that can't be used at all. The DRM modules fall to me exactly into that category for specialised hardware drivers that only have closed applications, and the answer to those should be a clear no. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Greg still claims that qcserial could be used by rebooting from Windows, right? In that it would still be extremly borderline to me, but it's qcserial has a firmware loader app nowdays (someone wrote one in April) http://www.codon.org.uk/~mjg59/gobi_loader/ indeed Matthew wrote it 8) -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
You obviously got all this completely wrong. I avoid writing closed source drivers whenever I can, I'm not whining and I'm not trying to push any of them. The code VIA is trying to submit has not been written by me nor anybody I know. All VIA code I and the companies I've worked for has written is open-sourced and contributed to the Openchrome / mesa / drm project. The point I'm trying to make is the following: If the common agreement of the linux community is to *NOT* allow these drivers in, so be it, then be honest and go ahead and tell the driver writers. Don't make them respin their development trying to fix minor flaws when their driver won't get in anyway! I would like to raise a couple of real-life issues I have in mind: * First example, let's say VIA gets their Chrome9 DRM merged into the kernel. Now let's say I reverse engineer the hardware (or use the docs whenever they're available) and write a 3D component that needs modifications to the existing DRM interface (or maybe I realize I need a completely new DRM). Then who gets the upper hand? Do I have to keep compatibility with user space binary modules that I do not care about? * Second example, what is the policy if we find security holes in the DRM for a closed user-space afterwards? This breaks the initial promise of security, does that get the driver removed then? Or what if the promise is pending updated documentation that never arrives? * Third example, what if down the line we need changes in the DRM that require updating all DRM modules. Do we (we as in DRM developers) touch the DRM files for the VIA Chrome9 stuff, at the risk of breaking the code (since we don't test with proprietary modules)? Or do we let the Chrome9 files as-is, keeping the old DRM infrastructure and therefore add more and more DRM cruft? In my opinion, accepting GPL'ed DRM modules that support binary user space components is like opening pandora's box. Stephane -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/21 Peter Zijlstra pet...@infradead.org: On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 15:38 +0200, Thomas Hellström wrote: Politics: It's true that sometimes some people don't like the code or what it does. But when this is the underlying cause of NAK-ing a driver I think it's very important that this is clearly stated, instead of inventing various random reasons that can easily be argued against. How should the driver writer otherwise get it right? Man-years might be spent fixing up drivers that will never get upstream anyway. I think it would help a lot of there was a documented set of driver features that were required and sufficient for a DRM driver to go upstream. It could look something like * Kernel coding style obeyed. Passing checkpatch. * fully functional GPL user-space driver. How can you argue that something as tailor made as a DRM interface can be used without it being a derived work? For a start the userspace is MIT licensed generally, also with architectures such as gallium3D you can't easily say a driver is derived from the kernel interface. Actually generally the argument is the drm interface would be derived work of the userspace. Kernel hackers aren't lawyers so I cringe whenever one of them says derived work, without understanding that 80-90% of the code is probably in the userspace 3D driver, so proving its derived from a 1000 line kernel interface is where it gets messy, and hence why a number of lawyers for Intel have already come down on thinking it was acceptable and from what I can see are still shipping kernels with an open drm but a closed userspace. So I'm not saying I agree with having these I'm just saying its not your 1000 line regulatory daemon case. Dave. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Stephane Marchesin wrote: You obviously got all this completely wrong. I avoid writing closed source drivers whenever I can, I'm not whining and I'm not trying to push any of them. The code VIA is trying to submit has not been written by me nor anybody I know. All VIA code I and the companies I've worked for has written is open-sourced and contributed to the Openchrome / mesa / drm project. The point I'm trying to make is the following: If the common agreement of the linux community is to *NOT* allow these drivers in, so be it, then be honest and go ahead and tell the driver writers. Don't make them respin their development trying to fix minor flaws when their driver won't get in anyway! Stephane, Some comments on how these things has been handled / could be handled. I would like to raise a couple of real-life issues I have in mind: * First example, let's say VIA gets their Chrome9 DRM merged into the kernel. Now let's say I reverse engineer the hardware (or use the docs whenever they're available) and write a 3D component that needs modifications to the existing DRM interface (or maybe I realize I need a completely new DRM). Then who gets the upper hand? Do I have to keep compatibility with user space binary modules that I do not care about? If there is a serious OS project, I'd start a new DRM driver. That's sort of what may happen with openChrome vs via.. * Second example, what is the policy if we find security holes in the DRM for a closed user-space afterwards? This breaks the initial promise of security, does that get the driver removed then? Or what if the promise is pending updated documentation that never arrives? I'd say the DRM driver gets disabled unless fixed. How would we handle that problem today with, for example, the SiS driver? * Third example, what if down the line we need changes in the DRM that require updating all DRM modules. Do we (we as in DRM developers) touch the DRM files for the VIA Chrome9 stuff, at the risk of breaking the code (since we don't test with proprietary modules)? Or do we let the Chrome9 files as-is, keeping the old DRM infrastructure and therefore add more and more DRM cruft? Again, this has been done quite commonly in the past and was easier to get right with the old drm.git testing ground. Same issue with unmaintained drivers with OS user-space. Who has actually tested all the drivers when making such a change? I certainly haven't. The change was left for testing for a while in drm.git before Dave moved it upstream. In my opinion, accepting GPL'ed DRM modules that support binary user space components is like opening pandora's box. Stephane Yeah, drivers supporting binary blobs only is out of the question as it seems. Now's the tricky question how do we handle VIA's patches where they claim they have an open-source 2D component that exercises all of the DRM module for EXA render acceleration, and on top of this the 3D binary driver that apparently uses no additional DRM functionality compared to the 2D component? In the ideal world I'd of course like to see a Chrome9 3D driver based of the new openChrome drm driver with a modern GPU memory manager, kernel modesetting and Gallium, but that's a dedicated man-year or more away if / when someone decides to work on it. /Thomas -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 07:18:55PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: Did VIA consider cooperation with distributions? Maybe they could sponsor some single Mesa developers? What about The Linux Driver Project: http://linuxdriverproject.org/ ? Maybe they would like to cooperate? I'm looking for some solutions VIA could use without giving out a lot of money. How can a developer work on such a driver without sufficient documentation existing? Yes, with thousands of pages of actual manual (not just register dumps) you can do that. And yes, with access to the not-opensource-able driver, you can too. But without both? Very difficult. Both VIA and myself have a good relation to Greg K-H from the linux driver project. But how would we dare to ask somebody to help at a seemingly impossible task? -- - Harald Welte haraldwe...@viatech.comhttp://linux.via.com.tw/ VIA Free and Open Source Software Liaison -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Andrey Panin pa...@centrinvest.ru writes: * Users are still on mercy of binary blob supplier. Will this blob run on arm ? Or powerpc ? Or even x86_64 ? Will it be compatible with XOrg X.Y ? Nobody knows that and there is no gain for users too. Actually there is a loss - users see the kernel (or partial) driver and think it's open source solution. Been there, it wasn't nice at start and even less nice when the thing chose not to work as advertised. This was (is?) also the case with NVidia graphics drivers, I know many people who purchased their cards thinking they are fully open-source (because their drivers had to be compiled). -- Krzysztof Halasa -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 04:16:20PM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: If the common agreement of the linux community is to *NOT* allow these drivers in, so be it, then be honest and go ahead and tell the driver writers. Don't make them respin their development trying to fix minor flaws when their driver won't get in anyway! The existing policy based on what has been rejected is: - If you have something which only works with some non-free tightly integrated software then we don't accept it Examples - GMX500, Intel wireless regulatory daemon. I think tightly integrated could do with some clarification here. qcserial was accepted despite not being functional without a closed userspace component - an open one's since been rewritten to allow it to work. Do we define tightly integrated as likely to cross the GPL line (potentially the case with Poulsbo, not the case with qcserial), or is it a pragmatic issue? What about specialised hardware drivers that only have closed applications? -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:34:09PM +0200, Harald Welte wrote: On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 07:18:55PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: Did VIA consider cooperation with distributions? Maybe they could sponsor some single Mesa developers? What about The Linux Driver Project: http://linuxdriverproject.org/ ? Maybe they would like to cooperate? I'm looking for some solutions VIA could use without giving out a lot of money. How can a developer work on such a driver without sufficient documentation existing? Yes, with thousands of pages of actual manual (not just register dumps) you can do that. And yes, with access to the not-opensource-able driver, you can too. But without both? Very difficult. Both VIA and myself have a good relation to Greg K-H from the linux driver project. But how would we dare to ask somebody to help at a seemingly impossible task? I agree, the driver project does not take on things where we do not have full specifications. thanks, greg k-h -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/20 Thomas Hellström tho...@shipmail.org: Stephane, Some comments on how these things has been handled / could be handled. I would like to raise a couple of real-life issues I have in mind: * First example, let's say VIA gets their Chrome9 DRM merged into the kernel. Now let's say I reverse engineer the hardware (or use the docs whenever they're available) and write a 3D component that needs modifications to the existing DRM interface (or maybe I realize I need a completely new DRM). Then who gets the upper hand? Do I have to keep compatibility with user space binary modules that I do not care about? If there is a serious OS project, I'd start a new DRM driver. That's sort of what may happen with openChrome vs via.. Well, for user space, there can be as many drivers as you want for a given device. But the DRM policy always was one driver per hardware so as to avoid confusing people, so what you're proposing is in fact not possible. In that case, this would even deter a fully open source driver as it would have to keep the same interface as some (possibly unsupported) driver. * Second example, what is the policy if we find security holes in the DRM for a closed user-space afterwards? This breaks the initial promise of security, does that get the driver removed then? Or what if the promise is pending updated documentation that never arrives? I'd say the DRM driver gets disabled unless fixed. How would we handle that problem today with, for example, the SiS driver? If no one can fix it it gets killed, yes. I would expect this to happen pretty quickly in fact, in which case the driver merge/problem found/driver removal cycle requires more work than it's worth. * Third example, what if down the line we need changes in the DRM that require updating all DRM modules. Do we (we as in DRM developers) touch the DRM files for the VIA Chrome9 stuff, at the risk of breaking the code (since we don't test with proprietary modules)? Or do we let the Chrome9 files as-is, keeping the old DRM infrastructure and therefore add more and more DRM cruft? Again, this has been done quite commonly in the past and was easier to get right with the old drm.git testing ground. Same issue with unmaintained drivers with OS user-space. Who has actually tested all the drivers when making such a change? I certainly haven't. The change was left for testing for a while in drm.git before Dave moved it upstream. Well, some of us want to be thorough when doing invasive changes, untestable code would prevent such changes (and then we get more of the DRM cruft as a result). And yes, if people do not cooperate on all drivers, this leads to issues in the code. At this point it's not a matter of open source vs closed, but a problem of cooperation. Stephane -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/21 Stephane Marchesin marche...@icps.u-strasbg.fr: 2009/7/20 Thomas Hellström tho...@shipmail.org: Stephane, Some comments on how these things has been handled / could be handled. I would like to raise a couple of real-life issues I have in mind: * First example, let's say VIA gets their Chrome9 DRM merged into the kernel. Now let's say I reverse engineer the hardware (or use the docs whenever they're available) and write a 3D component that needs modifications to the existing DRM interface (or maybe I realize I need a completely new DRM). Then who gets the upper hand? Do I have to keep compatibility with user space binary modules that I do not care about? If there is a serious OS project, I'd start a new DRM driver. That's sort of what may happen with openChrome vs via.. Well, for user space, there can be as many drivers as you want for a given device. But the DRM policy always was one driver per hardware so as to avoid confusing people, so what you're proposing is in fact not possible. In that case, this would even deter a fully open source driver as it would have to keep the same interface as some (possibly unsupported) driver. Well with KMS it sort of changes that a small bit, since a KMS driver really isn't required to share old interfaces, since having a KMS enabled kernel will break any userspace that is out there just by setting up the hw different. as long as the old code is still available in the backwards compat manner it should all be fine. We've also had two drm drivers before, i830 and i915 supported a lot of the same hw and it mostly worked, if you looked at it from a kernel perspective. Dave. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
I think tightly integrated could do with some clarification here. qcserial was accepted despite not being functional without a closed userspace component - an open one's since been rewritten to allow it to It got as far as staging with a good deal of complaint. I am not sure it would have gotten further unfixed (with my serial/tty maintainers hat on ;)). That however was about firmware - so a lot less tightly coupled. work. Do we define tightly integrated as likely to cross the GPL line (potentially the case with Poulsbo, not the case with qcserial), or is it a pragmatic issue? What about specialised hardware drivers that only have closed applications? Ultimately - ask a lawyer, ultimately this is a question about works and copyright boundaries. If the hardware has only some specific proprietary app then it sounds to me like it's not a general kernel interface so probably isn't a good interface anyway, let alone what the code may do. Alan -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 12:28:35AM +0100, Alan Cox wrote: I think tightly integrated could do with some clarification here. qcserial was accepted despite not being functional without a closed userspace component - an open one's since been rewritten to allow it to It got as far as staging with a good deal of complaint. I am not sure it would have gotten further unfixed (with my serial/tty maintainers hat on ;)). That however was about firmware - so a lot less tightly coupled. ? It was merged directly into drivers/usb/serial. work. Do we define tightly integrated as likely to cross the GPL line (potentially the case with Poulsbo, not the case with qcserial), or is it a pragmatic issue? What about specialised hardware drivers that only have closed applications? Ultimately - ask a lawyer, ultimately this is a question about works and copyright boundaries. If the hardware has only some specific proprietary app then it sounds to me like it's not a general kernel interface so probably isn't a good interface anyway, let alone what the code may do. I was more wondering about whether we had issues with code that wasn't a GPL concern but still depended on a closed component. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/20 Greg KH gre...@suse.de: On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:34:09PM +0200, Harald Welte wrote: On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 07:18:55PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: Did VIA consider cooperation with distributions? Maybe they could sponsor some single Mesa developers? What about The Linux Driver Project: http://linuxdriverproject.org/ ? Maybe they would like to cooperate? I'm looking for some solutions VIA could use without giving out a lot of money. How can a developer work on such a driver without sufficient documentation existing? Yes, with thousands of pages of actual manual (not just register dumps) you can do that. And yes, with access to the not-opensource-able driver, you can too. But without both? Very difficult. Both VIA and myself have a good relation to Greg K-H from the linux driver project. But how would we dare to ask somebody to help at a seemingly impossible task? I agree, the driver project does not take on things where we do not have full specifications. AFAIU project accepts resources (documentation, code) under NDA. Can't VIA just give additional docs and/or code of current 3D driver with some explainations about parts that can't be published (all under NDA)? I'm not expert about all that, just trying to find way for VIA to get open source 3D driver. Forgive me if answer is obvious. -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Hi Rafal and others. On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:37:50PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. That's really poor explaination for lefting Chrome 9 users without 3D. Earlier GPUs have at least some basic 3D (no Compiz) that works with simple apps. I understand you can't just release current 3D driver but I also belive AMD just proved it's possible to write 3D driver in ~year. Do you understand that VIA is a _very very_ small company, if I'm guessing probably 1% of the size of AMD? You might also have heard that in the current economic situation, many companies have a complete halt to any new hiring, and have in fact had to let go a lot of staff. I have no detailed insight into VIA's business, but as you can see from publicly available information, i.e. http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6142/, this is not really a situation where you have any room left to invest in products whose RD has finished a long time ago. You've already DRM part done (it's written and tested!) so that makes your work much easier. Did you try to calculate how many ppl would you need to hire to write that driver? Did you consider cooperation with some distro developers like AMD tried with Novell? Maybe I'm too optimistic but r600 driver was written quite fast by only few ppl with quite nice effect visible already. Right now, it is my undetstanding that even projects like the ati r600 driver, or the noveau driver are short of manpower. There are very few people in the community who have a lot of experience writing Xorg device drivers. Combine that with the fact that VIA's IGP products are only a very small portion of the overall market, there are not many users, both inndividual end users as well as corporate users, who have a high motivation working on it. Especially if there are new products on the roadmap that have a different architecture, and thus all work would probably not be possible. I am very much part of this community, and everyone who knows me knows how much I am a FOSS evangelist. I have never (and will never) use a proprietary graphics driver on my own systems. So I'm just providing my advice to VIA. And that advice clearly is to spend those few RD resources they have on proper FOSS drivers for upcoming products, rather on Chrome9 - which would then mean that we are stuck in the loop where products are released without a proper FOSS driver, and we keep catching up by working on FOSS much after the hardware hits the market. Sorry, I wish the world was different.. -- - Harald Welte haraldwe...@viatech.comhttp://linux.via.com.tw/ VIA Free and Open Source Software Liaison -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
If there are small amount of people with enough knowledge to write device drivers, let AMD, VIA, Intel and others make some small one week school and call people from this community to teach them how to do that. This way total cost of writing drivers will be significantly lower (each company should donate some money for this school, and to teach community members) and for return people from community will be educated to do that. It is win-win position - companies get drivers, community gets knowledge. I'm one of the first who would like to write drivers as part of my practice in programming. It is not up to me do decide how my programmer skills are, but I have MSc in Telecommunications Engineering, and also I had many hardware/software oriented exams. I believe for myself that I'm skilled programmer but I'm lacking of knowledge about X Window System, DRI, Gallium3D. To be worse I cannot find any satisfying literature on the Net to start learning. I'm not talking about some 'Tutorials' or 'Introductions' but about some documents where I could understand deeply how it is organized and how to write high quality drivers. Uros Nedic Belgrade, Serbia Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:22:09 +0200 From: haraldwe...@viatech.com To: zaj...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream CC: dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; richard...@via.com.tw; gre...@suse.de; brucech...@via.com.tw; josephc...@via.com.tw; benjamin...@viatech.com Hi Rafal and others. On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:37:50PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. That's really poor explaination for lefting Chrome 9 users without 3D. Earlier GPUs have at least some basic 3D (no Compiz) that works with simple apps. I understand you can't just release current 3D driver but I also belive AMD just proved it's possible to write 3D driver in ~year. Do you understand that VIA is a _very very_ small company, if I'm guessing probably 1% of the size of AMD? You might also have heard that in the current economic situation, many companies have a complete halt to any new hiring, and have in fact had to let go a lot of staff. I have no detailed insight into VIA's business, but as you can see from publicly available information, i.e. http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6142/, this is not really a situation where you have any room left to invest in products whose RD has finished a long time ago. You've already DRM part done (it's written and tested!) so that makes your work much easier. Did you try to calculate how many ppl would you need to hire to write that driver? Did you consider cooperation with some distro developers like AMD tried with Novell? Maybe I'm too optimistic but r600 driver was written quite fast by only few ppl with quite nice effect visible already. Right now, it is my undetstanding that even projects like the ati r600 driver, or the noveau driver are short of manpower. There are very few people in the community who have a lot of experience writing Xorg device drivers. Combine that with the fact that VIA's IGP products are only a very small portion of the overall market, there are not many users, both inndividual end users as well as corporate users, who have a high motivation working on it. Especially if there are new products on the roadmap that have a different architecture, and thus all work would probably not be possible. I am very much part of this community, and everyone who knows me knows how much I am a FOSS evangelist. I have never (and will never) use a proprietary graphics driver on my own systems. So I'm just providing my advice to VIA. And that advice clearly is to spend those few RD resources they have on proper FOSS drivers for upcoming products, rather on Chrome9 - which would then mean that we are stuck in the loop where products are released without a proper FOSS driver, and we keep catching up by working on FOSS much after the hardware hits the market. Sorry, I wish the world was different.. -- - Harald Welte http://linux.via.com.tw/ VIA Free and Open Source Software Liaison -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
W dniu 19 lipca 2009 12:22 użytkownik Harald Welte haraldwe...@viatech.com napisał: Hi Rafal and others. On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 07:37:50PM +0200, Rafał Miłecki wrote: 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. That's really poor explaination for lefting Chrome 9 users without 3D. Earlier GPUs have at least some basic 3D (no Compiz) that works with simple apps. I understand you can't just release current 3D driver but I also belive AMD just proved it's possible to write 3D driver in ~year. Do you understand that VIA is a _very very_ small company, if I'm guessing probably 1% of the size of AMD? You might also have heard that in the current economic situation, many companies have a complete halt to any new hiring, and have in fact had to let go a lot of staff. I have no detailed insight into VIA's business, but as you can see from publicly available information, i.e. http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6142/, this is not really a situation where you have any room left to invest in products whose RD has finished a long time ago. I had no idea VIA is so small company. I thought even in global recession then still car hire that 5 ppl more. I was so sure of than, I didn't even try to Google for it. You've already DRM part done (it's written and tested!) so that makes your work much easier. Did you try to calculate how many ppl would you need to hire to write that driver? Did you consider cooperation with some distro developers like AMD tried with Novell? Maybe I'm too optimistic but r600 driver was written quite fast by only few ppl with quite nice effect visible already. Right now, it is my undetstanding that even projects like the ati r600 driver, or the noveau driver are short of manpower. There are very few people in the community who have a lot of experience writing Xorg device drivers. Combine that with the fact that VIA's IGP products are only a very small portion of the overall market, there are not many users, both inndividual end users as well as corporate users, who have a high motivation working on it. Especially if there are new products on the roadmap that have a different architecture, and thus all work would probably not be possible. I am very much part of this community, and everyone who knows me knows how much I am a FOSS evangelist. I have never (and will never) use a proprietary graphics driver on my own systems. So I'm just providing my advice to VIA. And that advice clearly is to spend those few RD resources they have on proper FOSS drivers for upcoming products, rather on Chrome9 - which would then mean that we are stuck in the loop where products are released without a proper FOSS driver, and we keep catching up by working on FOSS much after the hardware hits the market. Sorry, I wish the world was different.. The main problem of VIA and community opinion about VIA is that they don't keep ppl informed. I've already pointed that on openchrome-devel ML... and got ignored :P With your explainations this makes much more sense. We can understand it's not that VIA ignores us, but they just can not afford writing new open driver. Did VIA consider cooperation with distributions? Maybe they could sponsor some single Mesa developers? What about The Linux Driver Project: http://linuxdriverproject.org/ ? Maybe they would like to cooperate? I'm looking for some solutions VIA could use without giving out a lot of money. -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
W dniu 19 lipca 2009 18:57 użytkownik Uros Nedic ur...@live.com napisał: If there are small amount of people with enough knowledge to write device drivers, let AMD, VIA, Intel and others make some small one week school and call people from this community to teach them how to do that. This way total cost of writing drivers will be significantly lower (each company should donate some money for this school, and to teach community members) and for return people from community will be educated to do that. It is win-win position - companies get drivers, community gets knowledge. I'm one of the first who would like to write drivers as part of my practice in programming. It is not up to me do decide how my programmer skills are, but I have MSc in Telecommunications Engineering, and also I had many hardware/software oriented exams. I believe for myself that I'm skilled programmer but I'm lacking of knowledge about X Window System, DRI, Gallium3D. To be worse I cannot find any satisfying literature on the Net to start learning. I'm not talking about some 'Tutorials' or 'Introductions' but about some documents where I could understand deeply how it is organized and how to write high quality drivers. I totally agree. Drivers development is really undocumented :/ I have problems understanding how DDX (modesetting) driver works, and most answers I have to get from IRC, not Google. I'm totaly scared of any 3D or even Xv programming. Add the fact that code also lacks documentation and it's extremly hard for some newbie to dig into that. Would be great if someone could document all that, but it seems noone is interested in that. Ppl how already understand that focus on coding, not documenting :/ -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Jerome, This DRM code is kernel space part of a matching Xorg driver that we are going thru final review to be submitted to xorg. The DRM is frozen but the user space code needs to fix a few bugs reported by our QA team. Prior version of xorg driver such as the one at http://linux.via.com.tw/support/beginDownload.action?eleid=17fid=381 doesn't use DRM. But the upcoming one does. Thanks, Benjamin Pan -Original Message- From: Jerome Glisse [mailto:gli...@freedesktop.org] Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 5:44 AM To: Harald Welte Cc: Dave Airlie; Benjamin Pan (Fremont); Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 13:37 +0200, Harald Welte wrote: [...] So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? It's hard to review if the interface is sane without knowing what userspace might need or not. Cheers, Jerome Glisse -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/17 benjamin...@viatech.com: This DRM code is kernel space part of a matching Xorg driver that we are going thru final review to be submitted to xorg. What do you mean by Xorg driver?! DDX driver like openChrome?! Last time you decided to work on openChrome, didn't you? -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
benjamin...@viatech.com wrote: Jerome, This DRM code is kernel space part of a matching Xorg driver that we are going thru final review to be submitted to xorg. The DRM is frozen but the user space code needs to fix a few bugs reported by our QA team. Prior version of xorg driver such as the one at http://linux.via.com.tw/support/beginDownload.action?eleid=17fid=381 doesn't use DRM. But the upcoming one does. Actually, there are a lot (too much even) DDX : - The VIA driver from linux.via.com.tw which is a stripped down version of another VIA driver with closed source binary only part from viaarena.com - openchrome - possibly unichrome, but I'm not sure it caught up with Chrome9 support. There is certainly room for improvement here, and stopping duplicated work would certainly help. However, there is no 3D driver for Chrome9 and VIA won't opensource the existing one because of third party code licensing issue. Neither VIA nor openchrome will start a driver on its own, because there is simply not enough manpower on either side to get this huge task done. VIA said the pixel shader documentation will be available publicly soon, and I certainly believe them because this document is already available to some people under NDA, and this is exactly how it was done with the previous doc VIA released. The issue here is to gather enough workforce. If all interested parties team up around one publicly developed Chrome9 3D driver, even if the task is huge, it can probably be done. Regards, Xavier Thanks, Benjamin Pan -Original Message- From: Jerome Glisse [mailto:gli...@freedesktop.org] Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 5:44 AM To: Harald Welte Cc: Dave Airlie; Benjamin Pan (Fremont); Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 13:37 +0200, Harald Welte wrote: [...] So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? It's hard to review if the interface is sane without knowing what userspace might need or not. Cheers, Jerome Glisse -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
With two mailing list on the distribution I should be more careful in making claims. I was referening to the open source accompanying VIA 's next xorg server/2D-display driver release. VIA is working on onopenChrome. But as each driver has it unique advantages and disadvantages, the converge takes time. We need to do it in an orchestrated way that that no user is abandoned in the process. That means each driver has to keep moving forward with releases but internally trying to match features and coding style so that a merge can happen down the road. The chrome9 DRM driver we are submitting here and patches to existing via DRM earlier are part of that on-going effort. -Original Message- From: Rafał Miłecki [mailto:zaj...@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, July 18, 2009 6:38 AM To: Benjamin Pan (Fremont) Cc: gli...@freedesktop.org; Harald Welte; Richard Lee; gre...@suse.de; Bruce Chang; Joseph Chan; dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream 2009/7/17 benjamin...@viatech.com: This DRM code is kernel space part of a matching Xorg driver that we are going thru final review to be submitted to xorg. What do you mean by Xorg driver?! DDX driver like openChrome?! Last time you decided to work on openChrome, didn't you? -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 03:37:46PM +0200, Rafa?? Mi??ecki wrote: 2009/7/17 benjamin...@viatech.com: This DRM code is kernel space part of a matching Xorg driver that we are going thru final review to be submitted to xorg. What do you mean by Xorg driver?! DDX driver like openChrome?! Last time you decided to work on openChrome, didn't you? Don't tell me that you didn't see that one coming a few lightyears off. Luc Verhaegen. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
2009/7/17 Harald Welte haraldwe...@viatech.com: 1) VIA's 3D Xorg driver cannot be released as FOSS since it cotains 3rd party licensed code (...) 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. That's really poor explaination for lefting Chrome 9 users without 3D. Earlier GPUs have at least some basic 3D (no Compiz) that works with simple apps. I understand you can't just release current 3D driver but I also belive AMD just proved it's possible to write 3D driver in ~year. You've already DRM part done (it's written and tested!) so that makes your work much easier. Did you try to calculate how many ppl would you need to hire to write that driver? Did you consider cooperation with some distro developers like AMD tried with Novell? Maybe I'm too optimistic but r600 driver was written quite fast by only few ppl with quite nice effect visible already. -- Rafał Miłecki -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
[Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
To whom it may ceoncern: The following 3 patches are the DRM kernel module that support VIA Chorme9 GFX chipset. They are based on 2.6.31-rc3. Please kindly help to integrate into kernel. Thanks and Best Regards Bruce C. Chang -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:36 PM, brucech...@via.com.tw wrote: To whom it may ceoncern: The following 3 patches are the DRM kernel module that support VIA Chorme9 GFX chipset. They are based on 2.6.31-rc3. Please kindly help to integrate into kernel. Is there a userspace, or available documentation to write a userspace to use this code. a DDX and a 3D driver? Dave. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 07:09:06PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:36 PM, brucech...@via.com.tw wrote: To whom it may ceoncern: The following 3 patches are the DRM kernel module that support VIA Chorme9 GFX chipset. They are based on 2.6.31-rc3. Please kindly help to integrate into kernel. Is there a userspace, or available documentation to write a userspace to use this code. Dear David, the situation is still like it was some time ago: 1) VIA's 3D Xorg driver cannot be released as FOSS since it cotains 3rd party licensed code 2) VIA is very supportive of anybody in the community who will work on a FOSS 3D driver for Chrome9. However, we are not aware of any such project :( 3) VIA has released all the programming documentation that it has for this specific chipset, it is available from http://www.x.org/docs/via/ What is still missing is the pixel shader documentation, which will join those public documents soon. 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. I would be the first person to argue in favour of having some FOSS userspace code against this DRM kernel driver - but I can also understand the practical constraints. Given that the technical issues (32bit ioctl compat, ...) can be adressed, I would hope the driver can get merged. So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? Regards, Harald -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
RE: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
Would something like mesa/r600_demo be appropriate ? -Original Message- From: Keith Whitwell [mailto:kei...@vmware.com] Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 9:24 AM To: Harald Welte Cc: dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net; richard...@via.com.tw; gre...@suse.de; brucech...@via.com.tw; josephc...@via.com.tw; benjamin...@viatech.com Subject: Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 04:37 -0700, Harald Welte wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 07:09:06PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:36 PM, brucech...@via.com.tw wrote: To whom it may ceoncern: The following 3 patches are the DRM kernel module that support VIA Chorme9 GFX chipset. They are based on 2.6.31-rc3. Please kindly help to integrate into kernel. Is there a userspace, or available documentation to write a userspace to use this code. Dear David, the situation is still like it was some time ago: 1) VIA's 3D Xorg driver cannot be released as FOSS since it cotains 3rd party licensed code 2) VIA is very supportive of anybody in the community who will work on a FOSS 3D driver for Chrome9. However, we are not aware of any such project :( 3) VIA has released all the programming documentation that it has for this specific chipset, it is available from http://www.x.org/docs/via/ What is still missing is the pixel shader documentation, which will join those public documents soon. 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. I would be the first person to argue in favour of having some FOSS userspace code against this DRM kernel driver - but I can also understand the practical constraints. Given that the technical issues (32bit ioctl compat, ...) can be adressed, I would hope the driver can get merged. So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? Maybe VIA can provide some userspace code without putting together an entire driver. A handful of standalone programs that exercise the interface would help evaluate the interfaces and might be sufficient to serve as guide to someone wanting to use this module. A handful would include: -- draw a triangle -- draw a textured triangle -- draw a triangle using indexed vertices -- some sort of occlusion query At least then there would be some concrete examples of this in use so that an interested party wouldn't later have to work from scratch. Keith -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 15:23, Keith Whitwellkei...@vmware.com wrote: Maybe VIA can provide some userspace code without putting together an entire driver. A handful of standalone programs that exercise the interface would help evaluate the interfaces and might be sufficient to serve as guide to someone wanting to use this module. A handful would include: -- draw a triangle -- draw a textured triangle -- draw a triangle using indexed vertices -- some sort of occlusion query At least then there would be some concrete examples of this in use so that an interested party wouldn't later have to work from scratch. Well, given that you'd be (first and foremost, IMO) trying to evaluate the security of the DRM module, this would also require some code demonstrating DMA transfers and texturing over AGP/PCI... In any case, a similar situation occured before (open DRM driver but proprietary user space bits): http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/809146 Stephane -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
Re: [Patch 0/3] Resubmit VIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:37 PM, Harald Welteharaldwe...@viatech.com wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 07:09:06PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote: On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 4:36 PM, brucech...@via.com.tw wrote: To whom it may ceoncern: The following 3 patches are the DRM kernel module that support VIA Chorme9 GFX chipset. They are based on 2.6.31-rc3. Please kindly help to integrate into kernel. Is there a userspace, or available documentation to write a userspace to use this code. Dear David, the situation is still like it was some time ago: Is there an open source DDX to set this up? 4) VIA does not have the resources to write an entirely new 3D driver for Chrome9, especially since future products contain a different, incompatible GPU. I think it's much more useful to focus the resources at getting things right for those future products. So, as you can see, the situation is far from being perfect. However, it could also be much worse. I would be the first person to argue in favour of having some FOSS userspace code against this DRM kernel driver - but I can also understand the practical constraints. Given that the technical issues (32bit ioctl compat, ...) can be adressed, I would hope the driver can get merged. So far I was not aware that there is an absolute precondition of existing 3D FOSS userspace code to get a DRM driver merged. Yes, we all want it. But is it a strong requirement? We definitely need something to exercise the interface, how do we ever know if we break this interface directly or indirectly. The code as-is is of no use to the Linux kernel or open source communities. We cannot ship this in a distro and have it do anything. So the question is why would you want this upstream? if you need a binary DDX and a binary 3D driver why don't you just keep shipping this out of tree? Dave. -- Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge -- ___ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
