On 1/8/06, Lourens Veen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There's an article over at Linux Today > (http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/2006010701126NWEV) with the > following interesting tidbit: > > "I talked to one of [S3's] reps (who gave the impression of being fairly > senior in the company), and he cast some interesting insight into the whole > Linux graphics driver issue. According to him, it's not an issue of revealing > cool high end features to the competition that is keeping them from releasing > the high-performance 3D drivers into the kernel. It's that the drivers will > reveal flaws in the hardware that could be used against them by their > competitors." > > Could be interesting marketing for Traversal. "Our hardware is so good, we > actually dare tell you about its flaws" :-)
I think he's full of it. Every chip ever made has flaws, and there are often elaborate things you have to do to work around them in software. Not to say that any hardware vendor is above being a hypocrite, but that's exactly what it would be. Ever looked at the ALSA drivers in Linux? The reason it took so long to get sound out of a good number of different chipsets implementing AC97 is that they all had different bugs to work around. Every Intel processor has bugs; they just have the ability to upload microcode patches to work around them. This is all very silly. We're going to have bugs. Even after extensive testing in FPGA, something is going to require at least a software workaround. And that's just life. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
