[geeks] Sun to adopt newest Intel Xeon chips for upcoming servers (link)

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 @ 09:46 -0500, Joshua Boyd said:

> On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 04:55:08PM +0200, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 09:30:10AM -0500, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> > > I don't think Nvidia's support of OSS efforts have been up to snuff, 
> > > personally.
> > 
> > That's a matter of opinion. They provide the necessary documentation
> > to write a decent driver, and a closed source supported driver for
> > X86 Linux. 
> 
> I haven't seen anything about them providing the info needed for a
> decent driver since the TNT days.  

If you'll check the source, some of the authors of the 2D driver work
for nVidia, or used to.

> The free nvidia drivers are 2D only,
> and they aren't even all that fast for 2D.  

That's because nVidia is not allowed to release information about their
3D engine.

You have to understand that while nVidia produces the GPUs, the
technology in them is owned by several other companies, including SGI.

SGI flatly refuses to agree to a release of information. They still
don't fully support open source OpenGL.

I find that ironic since SGI is dying and Microsoft is busy killing off
OpenGL, and if anything SGI should be giving the keys away to anyone
willing to support it right now.

> To get any sort of 3D from
> recent cards (for values of recent that are anything newer than TNT2),
> people are having to reverse engineer the binary drivers.

The other issue is that there are very, very few people capable of
writing a good GPU driver.

It's not like writing just any other drivers.

You have to know a great deal about software from multiple platforms
going back many years, and make sure you don't break anything.

You have to do liason work with a great many people, including those
working on proprietary products, to make sure you support what is coming
in addition to past and present software.

You have to do extensive quality control testing to make sure it works
reliably.

Open source projects are notoriously bad at those three things, and
those are only a small part of the work needed for a good GPU driver.

Imagine the attitude of Gnome developers on a GPU project.  It would be
a disaster.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The strength of the Constitution lies
entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it.  Only if every
single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the
constitutional rights secure." -- Albert Einstein]