I sent the following email message to most of the e-mail addresses on the Trident Microsystems web page, and received reply from a person at Trident saying that this ws the address to which my message should have been directed.
There have been many messages on the XFree Xpert mailing list from people who, like me, have recently acquired computers with a CyberBlade graphics chips and who are in search of a driver for XFree 4.0 or XFree 4.1 that includes code providing the hardware acceleration. The most interesting to me is the message reporting that you CEO said there was a suitable driver available on your web page, which turns out to be incorrect as far as any of us can determine. I would settle for the release of the information required to enhance the current XFree 4.x driver with hardware acceleration. Here is the first message I sent to Trident. dlg ============================================================================== From: David L. Gehrt [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, January 04, 2002 10:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: General X Discussion Subject: Release of CyberBlade driver information I hope that this somehow wends its way to the correct people. I recently purchased a Toshiba 1805-274 laptop with a Trident CyberBlade-T (Maybe CyberBlade-X IA1) graphics chip in part because I relied on the representations on the Trident Web page that the graphics controller was supported by Linux drivers. Then I installed Linux (I use RH 7.2 which came with XFree86 4.1) I discovered that the Linux Trident driver support did not include the CyberBlade-T (or what ever graphics controller is on the Toshiba laptop). The then existing CyberBlade driver produced an image but it was unsatisfactory. After some examination of the XFree86 information resources, and exchanging e-mail with a cooperative developer, the developer was able to produce a driver which will be part of the XFree 4.2 distribution. I downloaded the 4.1.99 sources (This being the 4.2 release candidate) compiled and installed the resulting binaries including the CyberBlade driver. Upon starting the new XFree driver the problems earlier experienced were gone, but the absence of acceleration code renders the driver slow. I consider the current driver unusable for applications that require high performance graphics, and marginal, or slightly better than marginal for normal applications. My judgment is based on comparison with older graphics cards on several desk side systems which graphics cards are a year or two old. The problem seems to be the failure to release information on hardware acceleration to XFree86 driver develops so that they can produce an open source accelerated driver for the CyberBlade-T graphics interface. I do not understand this reluctance. I have written to the XFree86 Xpert mailing list that people considering a purchase of a system to run Linux, and by implication any open source operating system avoid systems that use CyberBlade graphics controllers until this situation gets cleared up. So the bottom line is that I am interested in the answers to a couple of questions: What is the justification for not releasing the information needed to produce a driver that provides hardware acceleration for X Windows? This really is not meant as an accusatory question, I really am interested in understanding Trident's position on this. How am I supposed to understand the assertion on your web page that there are drivers for Linux, when that does not seem to accurate? Again these days I do not think that such an assertion can be accurate with out full support for the windowing system Linux (or any other OS) uses. Respectfully, dlg David L. Gehrt P.S. I would have sent e-mail to Toshiba, but the Toshiba web page did not seem to list any e-mail addresses. _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
