Garrett D'Amore <garrett_damore@tadpole.com> writes:
>> It might (or might not) be a bad idea, but we simply do not have the
>> manpower to deal with the vast flow of new video cards that arrive
>> with time. We have to use the X.org drivers because by doing that, we
>> get to piggyback on all their manpower. Unless you have a way to fix
>> that problem, even if the current system sucks rocks, we'll have to
>> continue using it.
>
> Well, I am tackling that problem head-on.  I have a radeonfb in the
> works, that will improve the situation for a large number of ATI radeon
> owners.
>
> It will be easy to spin this into a Rage driver as well.

Do you have a native OpenGL implementation that speaks to the card?
Because if you don't, it doesn't matter. The bulk of the interest in
modern cards is the 3D acceleration, and I think we have no hope of
doing that on our own. We already are behind on this because we have
difficulty supporting the existing stuff that we *do* have code for...

I think this is a losing battle. We're just never going to be able to
keep up with it without a staff of a dozen full time programmers
working on the video drivers, and we don't have that and never will.

A smarter move would be trying to figure out how to produce shims so
we can take stuff out of the X distribution directly, without having
to rewrite the stuff.

> We have machfb and friends.
>
> Nvidia is a totally different problem.  I think we are 100% at the mercy
> of Nvidia as there are no open source drivers for recent Nvidia boards,
> that I'm aware of.

Again, I don't think we have any hope of doing the most interesting
stuff they have available anyway, and which we ultimately need.

Perry