thus Brett Lymn spake:
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 01:52:35PM +0200, Timo Schoeler wrote:
>> it's possible now to go for userland blobs on Linux:
>>
>> http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0608.3/1908.html
>>
> 
> That is only a userland interface to a pci bus.  That will not go
> anywhere to help in the case of 3d accelerators.

i didn't write that it's of use for 3d accellerators. it's the blob 
thing that's the topic, regardless of whether it powers an USB coffee 
cup heater or a sixteen channel VR screen replacing a good, old sgi Onyx2.

>> i still see the problem of supporting only i386/amd64 in the long term 
>> when accepting blobs.
> 
> *shrug* it may be a somewhat narrow focus but the applications I am
>  interested in running on a 3d accelerator only run on i386/amd64.  If
>  you are looking to gaming to drive the demand then that is the market
>  space you are working in.

who introduced gaming? you did. it's not about the application nor the 
device the driver's being written for.

it's a *political thing*. if you choose to use an open source OS it's 
more than superlame when then developers start to accept binary drivers. 
it's contrary to the OSs' 'karma', 'mission' or whatever you want to 
call it.

(btw: last time i had time to do computer gaming (!) was at least a 
decade ago. i'd rather buy a PS3, X360 or something else (PowerPC 
driven, yummy!) than using a PeeCee with all it's horrible architectural 
stuff for gaming.)

>> fortunately, there are other OS, and one could 
>> even start a new one (fork or from ground up).
>>
> 
> regardless of whether to go off to another OS or even start your own,
> you are still faced with the fact that someone either has to leverage
> the documents out of the hardware manufacturers (a seemingly difficult
> task) OR reverse their driver and write your own (another seemingly
> difficult task).

no question, but that's the thing to change. even Sun (!) opened up 
their UltraSPARC T1 that much it's possible to port almost any OS onto 
it (is there an AmigaOS port, anyone? ;).

> If you acheive either of these goals it really does
> not matter what OS you are on - you have the driver but until then you
> either do without or use a blob. rock. hard place. choose.

that's giving up. that's murdering everything else but i386 and maybe 
some other archs backed up by their vendors (IBM/Power.org PowerPC, 
Sun/Fujitsu et al. SPARC, HP PA-RISC, MIPS, ARM) in a propritary way.

if it's a problem to get ATI opening up their drivers, hell, than 
there's even much more need for open hardware.

http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open-Graphics&PHPSESSID=bdce7acebd3cb92bebc3e7a6dbe4dd29

cheers,

-- 
Timo Schoeler | http://riscworks.net/~tis | timo.schoeler@riscworks.net
RISCworks -- Perfection is a powerful message
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Frankie says: Relax