On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 13:32 -0300, Daniel da Veiga wrote: > The fact is that we need the hardware corporations to release drivers > for its hardware that works on all systems, take a look at NVidia, it > took me 10 minutes to install my video drive, both on Win and Lin. > What I meant to say is: To support new hardware should be more of a > hardware engineer problem than an OS programmer one.
At the risk of playing devil's advocate, there's a flipside to this. Code is [almost] never perfect, and anyone who subscribes to gentoo-announce knows that there are almost always security flaws discovered (and patched) after an initial version is released. If more functionality is pulled into the hardware, with the same potential for flaws (security or otherwise), then you've got a tough predicament. As a hardware engineer, do you spec more expensive re-programmable parts, or do you risk premature obsolescence (and potentially millions of $$ in lost NRE charges) by using ROM-based parts? Consider a video vendor who spins an ASIC (a custom chip) for its latest graphics card... They might spend $50 million in mask fees to have the new chip produced. Amortized over 100,000 graphics cards produced, this is less expensive to them (and thus to us as consumers) than instead spec'ing a re-programmable chip that costs 5x as much. What's really needed is not for hardware engineers to integrate more functionality into their hardware, but rather for hardware and software engineers to better work together. There's plenty of open-ness on the part of software engineers; but the companies don't want to release the gritty technical details of their products, and thus the hardware engineers' hands are tied. Open the eyes of the managers and administrators, and you'll open the hardware. Just my $0.02 as a hardware designer who regularly struggles with these same issues... :) DDR -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list