Jeff Garzik wrote:
James Richard Tyrer wrote:
Intel claims that they provide complete documentation. VIA isn't that
Intel has certainly -not- provided full docs.
An open source X driver with 3D acceleration exists. How was that
developed without documentation?
clear about releasing a data sheet. They seem to want an NDA which I
have no problem with since I have no interest in reverse engineering
their chips.
VIA does indeed provide GPU docs under NDA.
open source driver for Intel. The VIA driver is only for a frame buffer.
False. Trivial inspection shows a full, open source, 2D/3D accelerated
driver for VIA is available. Taking two seconds to do "ls
drivers/char/drm" in the kernel source tree would have shown you reality.
Is that for the UniChorme chip? The dox says that it is for the
MVP3/Apollo chip set.
The driver which VIA supplies for the UniChrome chip (FBDev_Lite) is a
frame buffer
The Linux market isn't asking them for an investment. What we have
been asking for is the full documentation of the chips. Note that
graphics
False. Full documentation is an investment that requires legal $$$,
plus opportunity cost, plus potential cost of your company's primary
product being supported at a sub-standard level.
chips are an anomaly here. All other chips I know of have full
documentation available.
Ok that is just laughable. There are so many counter-examples its not
even funny. Easy examples: Ethernet, SATA (areas I deal with every day
in the Linux kernel)
Say WHAT? How do they sell chips if they won't supply documentation?
and winmodems
A winmodem is not a chip, it is a board or module. Some may have custom
chips, but they started out as a DAC and an ADC -- better ones also have
a DSP or controller chip. What they won't give out is the driver for
the board, but then some of the manufacturers started giving out a
driver for Linux. This is a situation similar to the graphics drivers.
The driver is proprietary, but there is stuff in it that can't be
patented.
all have hardware vendors that refuse to give out docs.
I have not looked at SATA chips, but all the NIC chips I have looked at
are documented. Perhaps you are using the word "documentation" in some
different sense. If they tell you what all the registers are for, that
is full documentation.
The law guarantees that they cannot go into the open source market in
a big way.
Explain this please!
I suspect that the problem is that they don't have a patent. They can
<blink> Um... ATI and NV have bunches of patents. Search the patent
database. Graphics is a patent minefield.
But, there is OpenGL which stands as prior art. Unfortunately,
companies patent everything that they can knowing full well that 90% or
more of it won't stand up if challenged.
Have you been reading this thread at all?
Perhaps a few more words would have made this clearer. They are
obviously trying to protect something which is not patented.
If everything were protected by valid patents, then it has all been
publicly disclosed and there is no reason not to provide documentation.
copyright the drivers and copyright the chip, but that doesn't prevent
reverse engineering of the chip, or making a clean room clone.
Without a patent grant, you would be infringing if you distributed the
RE work product.
This issue is currently an area of contention. ARM has managed to get
all of the clones taken off the market. But, that is a processor, not
an ASIC. OTOH, clean room RE of the IBM-PC BIOS was determined not to
be a copyright infringement. If they tell me what all the registers are
for and what the commands do, and I independently design a chip that
does exactly the same thing -- produces exactly the same output -- with
NO knowledge of the inner workings of their chip, have I violated a
patent. I doubt it. You can't patent a register layout. You can't
patent an instruction set (specifically you can't patent a programing
language). The patents would be on the methods that the internals of
the chip are implemented with and if I do a clean room clone, I
deliberately don't know anything about that.
--
JRT
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
