On 2 Mar 2003, Antonino Daplas wrote:
>
> AFAIK, there are at least 2 versions of the i810 framebuffer driver
> publicly available, both of which are not possible without the public
> docs.
I don't think that answers Mike's criticism that open-source developers
don't tend to work on DRI.
And I think he's right. The reason you find open-source people working on
fbdev and mplayer etc is because those tend to be _easier_ projects to get
into.
Quite frankly, DRI is the project from hell when it comes to "getting
into" it, and I think that's largely because you have to have all the
pieces in place to get something working, and you have to understand a
wide range of different issues (you can't just understand hardware, you
also have to have some understanding of OpenGL).
Which just tends to cut down the number of people who are willing and able
to do the work.
Add to that the fact that for many of the common chipsets documentation is
hard to get ("common" here not being in absolute numbers, but in the kind
of hw that people who are really interested in 3D would want to buy), and
it's no wonder that there aren't that many people working on it - there
are just a lot of things working _against_ new people.
Look at the size of a 3D driver today, and _especially_ look at how it
actually needs at least three totally separate parts - the generic OpenGL
part, the card-specific part, and the kernel part. None of which are in
any way independent from each other (the generic OpenGL part should be,
but as can be seen from what both Nvidia and ATI have done, it ends up
being tied into the low-level driver _anyway_ because of issues like
feature reporting).
Add to the complexity that you have to understand a fairly arcane and
arguably badly designed AGP interface too, and no wonder people are not
lining up in the streets.
I _suspect_ that the fact that most modern graphics cards are designed
mainly for DirectX might make the whole thing slightly worse (ie just from
causing some additional disconnect between what the hardware does and what
the interfaces are).
A simpler, more direct, infrastructure to the low-level driver might help.
I suspect that is why MS started doing D3D in the first place, and it is
clearly why things like glide ever even existed in the first place -
avoiding to have to know as much as people currently do have to know.
Assume people are stupid. We usually are.
Linus
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