On 5/29/05, Alexander van Heukelum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Questions? Remarks? Should I shut up? >
This is all being over-blown. We want to be JUST VGA-compatible enough to be usable AND NO MORE. VGA is LEGACY and should be done away with. It's a thorn in our side and does nothing for anyone but x86 users, and hopefully some day, people will find a way to get rid of that too. We need to figure out how to do the BARE MINIMUM. Also, keep in mind that time is valuable. Sure, clever solutions are welcome, and people are having some fun, but we need a quick-and-dirty solution. Maybe it's quicker just to code the damn thing in verilog and skip the nanoprocessor. I'm willing to dedicate some extra logic for the sake of not wasting the time of the volunteers who are working on it. And while there are cool things that could possibly happen if a general-purpose processor had access to the GPU pipeline, whenever you start trying to get too clever with this design, you risk compromising its success. We need to do efficient engineering. Some people would say that this project is a critical point in history, where hardware design is being opened up to the people and FOSS compatibility is a main principle. Well, if that's the case, we need to keep that in mind as our prime directive. Version 2.0 is the time to dream about clever hacks. Assuming we get that far, we'll have the backing and funding to experiment. But in order to get to that point, we have to be eminently practical, right now. If (and I mean IF) a nanocontroller is able to access the GPU pipeline, that's a nice bonus that makes the design attractive for a few hackers, but the instant that becomes a primary objective, we've lost sight of the bigger picture of what we're trying to accomplish here. (Oh, did I mention that the nanocontroller is integer only, while the GPU has lots of floating-point?) Everyone who is working on this needs to dedicate their intelligence to finding the bare minimum necessary to get legacy x86 BIOS and boot screens to be just barely usable. It does not have to be pretty. It just has to work. Our VGA support should be just what we need to limp along until an OS loads and a real driver kicks in. And remember, for PowerPC users (and other non-x86), this VGA unit is nothing more than a waste of logic and electricity and is something that does nothing more than eat into other functionality and slow our time to market. We have a real need to meet. Good FOSS-compatible graphics hardware is disappearing from the market, and while we're years behind, we have the potential to catch up quickly and ensure that our little niche of the FOSS community is pain-free. And always remember, by meeting this need, we open ourselves up many future opportunities to do way cooler stuff than a basic graphics card. And something I've learned over the years is that being efficient and practical can sometimes take more intelligence and energy than being creative and clever. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
