any impending news on video drivers for f12?

[Bill McGonigle]

On 08/17/2009 02:50 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Bill's post isn't wrong in any respect, but it's just a description of a
> situation that everyone knows damn well about already. Everyone working
> on X is aware that the entire thing is a gigantic moving target, but
> restating the problem doesn't help anyone move forward...

Let me pose a few questions to illustrate some of my unknowns.  I'll try
to be concise, and I recognize these are somewhat interdependent:

1) is there a known scope to the limit of work that needs to be done to
make xorg generally useful for desktop users?  That is, is this an
arduous interval with a known outcome for fixing the current drivers or
is the future purely speculative? (again, with utmost respect for those
putting in the hard development work)
1a) are we hitting expected problems, illustrating unfinished work, or
exposing poorly considered architecture/decisions?  Is this process
proceeding as expected or is it much worse (or better)?
1b) do we stand a chance of catching up to the pace of hardware
development at the current driver development rate?

2) assuming 1 is bounded, once intel/radeon are whipped into shape, are
we out of the woods?  More specifically, are ATI & Intel actually
providing hardware spec or are we still having to reverse engineer?
This gets to open source being able to keep up with the hardware
revision cycle.  It used to be this was forever doomed to uncertainty,
hardware availability to reverse engineers and HCL's.  I thought it had
gotten better, and certainly an open future is much brighter.

3) is xorg making the right decisions?  Software management is littered
with the bodies of those who decided a ground-up rewrite is the only way
to go.  Yet, sometimes it is.

4) in retrospect, did Fedora adopt the new drivers at the right point in
their lifetimes?  This is tricky - on one hand we want Fedora to be a
great environment for development of new technologies.  But, to be held
in balance is that certain things, like video not working, can bring
huge other parts of the development process to a halt (e.g. I've got an
OpenGL app that can't be developed on a current Fedora on any of the
several hardware devices I have at hand, so that proceeds on another
distro).  I'm reminded of the recent effort to move opensync from .3
back to .2 because the upstream acknowledges widespread brokenness and,
as such, asks distros to not package .3.

-Bill

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