[rescue] OT: Solaris for Intel

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 09:13:59AM -0400, joshua d boyd wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 06:57:22AM -0400, Ken Hansen wrote:
> > www.xig.com - the sell X servers for laptops and poorly supoorted desktop video
> > cards...
> 
> Of course, this raises the question, are those chipsets poorly supported
> because of xig?  Many people tell me that if Xig went away, the people
> whose cards are only supported by it would be finally presured to release
> enough info for XFree drivers to be written.

Nope.  

Some actual reasons:

The particular chip company doesn't see a need to bother with XF drivers,
maybe because they are targeting the Windows market

The chip company doesn't want to release specs for their own reasons (like
maybe patent issues or whatnot)

XF simply doesn't have anyone who has written a driver for it.

XF driver writer can't understand the specs (many specs are poorly written)

XF driver hasn't added all the color depths that are possible with the chip

As well, XF is not as fast as XIG.  A Matrox Millennium II with 8MB WRAM
will beat the pants off any Sun/SGI/HP card in terms of raw 2D X
performance.  In 3D, of course the x86 architecture is hobbled by AGP bus
bandwidth.

Nor is XF as "correct" as XIG.  I know, because I ran the X conformance
tests against both when I worked at XIG.  XIG server passed the tests; the
XF server would crash or even lockup the whole machine (depending on video
card); if it did make it the whole way through, it had still failed many of
the tests.  

XF has many many people working on the drivers, including the guys at
PrecisionInsight.com (founders are ex-XIG employees).  

XIG?  one guy who is a genius.  I saw him go home with an unsupported laptop
on Friday and on Monday he had the X server working on the laptop, including
different color depths, etc.

Actually, Joshua, YOU should go work for XIG - you have the math to do it;
and they are looking for employees.

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net