Cairo [was: rawhide report: 20050621 changes]

[Rodd Clarkson]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 06:28 +0200, Marcus Hartig wrote:
> Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to add to the wish list for FC5 at this point.  If cairo is
> > going to become a part of FC5, then I'd like to see more work put into
> > producing FOSS drivers to support hardware acceleration out of the box.
> 
> A dream?

<song style="bursting">
To dream, the impossible dream.
To fight the unbeatable foe
etc.
</song>

> And where do you take the specs fropm? nVidia will not and can not 
> release their driver/GPU specs for developing an open source driver with 
> all features.

> But they make a very good job with their own linux driver.

Yeah, there's not denying that this would be a very hard thing to do.
I'm well aware of it.  I'm pretty sure I mentioned that it was a "big
ask" in my email.

I don't actually think that NVIDIA do that good a job.  If they supplied
the same sort of 'enthusiasm' they do to their Linux drivers to their
Windows drivers they'd be bankrupt in no time at all.

While I won't expect them to be on the bleeding edge, they are usually
two or three steps behind.  As one example, support for a change in the
stacks in the kernel (from 4k to 8k or the other way around) too
forever.  This was a huge inconvenience for many, and while I don't
think the should be following the ebb and flow of each and every
distro's development cycle the example above was inevitable regardless
of the distro.  It would be like them saying we'll wait and see what
Microsoft releases before we put out our next driver.  (Yeah right).

I they wish to treat Linux as a second class citizen then they can, but
it doesn't mean that I have to think they are doing a good job.  They
could certainly do better.

> Ati?

Same goes for ATI.  The recently released driver (as far as I'm aware)
doesn't compile of GCC4.  Again, this isn't a distro specific thing,
it's just an inevitability.  So why don't the new drivers support it? 

On the bright side, there is some moves to produce a open source driver
for RADEON cards.

http://r300.sourceforge.net/

"This site was created to document our progress in understanding R300 3d
acceleration engine. (R300 is a family of cards made by ATI, in
particular it includes Radeon 9700 cards and Mobility M10 cards used in
notebooks). We are also interested in earlier and later Radeon
hardware."

I haven't been able to test because it needs a recent version of Xorg
from CVS and there is problems getting the patches to apply to current
kernels, but the author is reporting good results.

So there is some light at the end of the tunnel.


Rodd
-- 
"It's a fine line between denial and faith.
 It's much better on my side"