The subscriber-only July 20 version of lwn leads off with an article summarizing an Ottawa Linux Symposium talk.
It will be open to the public a week from now, but I believe it's fair use to summarize their summary. Speaker David Airlie: - Intel chipsets are relatively well supported - ATI is a "former leading light" in the free software world, but is no longer cooperating. - free R200 driver is feature-complete and, at this point, faster than the binary-only fglrx driver - reverse-engineered R300/R400 driver is getting closer - no hope for the R500 chipset at this point - Nvidia has a 2D driver in X.org which is "written in hex" and a well-supported, binary 3D driver. Said driver "still sucks," of course. .. - On the Nvidia side, the best hope is the Nouveau project, which has set out to create a reverse-engineered 3D Nvidia driver. There about five or six people currently working on the project, which also looks to add some nice 2D features (EXA acceleration, dual head support). The Nouveau developers have no code to show at this point, being heavily involved in the reverse engineering work. Progress is being made, but this is a large project, bigger than the ATI R300 effort. For those who are interested in contributing to the community, Nouveau looks like a project which could use some more help ---- Hmm, not a whole lot different flavor from what was recently passed around on our KPLUG list, eh? The article author did express a bit of optimism coming out of the symposium talk -- maybe mostly hopeful, though. There are already a couple of comments, one of which suggests that a stable, decent (not necessarily blazing) OpenGL gaming environment on linux might well draw attention of card manufacturers. It might be worth it to check for more postings after the 1-week closed-access period expires. (http://lwn.net/Articles/191134/) For those who are not familiar with lwn, last-weeks weekly news is now open-access at http://lwn.net/Articles/190385/ for browsing. I especially like their kernel and security coverage. Plus the occasional feature article on some app or class of apps. ..jim -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
