[...] > I don't know about other devices, but for the SPARC > Graphics cards, > Sun cannot open the sources to most of them without > violating the > contracts with the vendors who actually made the > devices that Sun > OEM'ed. > > -- > -Alan Coopersmith-
For the ones dependent on 3rd party graphics chipsets, that's clear enough (although they're mostly old enough that _asking_ the vendors might actually get at least a few positive responses). For the ones they designed in-house (most or all that used the UPA bus, for example), I think maybe it's more about lack of resources to get them opened up. (I filed a request for info on the XVR-1000 on http://wikis.sun.com/display/FOSSdocs/Home in May 2008 (others filed requests for the Elite-3D and Creator-3D in April 2008), and those requests are still open...which is frustrating. On any workstation with a UPA slot, that's probably the highest bandwidth slot in the box, ideal for graphics and not much use for anything else. There's a driver for the Creator-3D at least (maybe the Elite-3D too, I don't know) that's supposed to work, but thus far only with an entire alternate build of Xorg (which didn't work for me the 1 or 2 times I tried it). I've got a Creator-3D kicking around that's _much_ slower than the XVR-1000, but also much faster than the still-supported XVR-100 (esp. since my 66MHz PCI slot has a SAS controller in it). While I would really hate to do without the XVR-1000, even having the Creator-3D driver integrated would be better than how things will be when SXCE is gone. (Also, I gather there's an open-source driver for the m64 on-board the SB100/150 that would be nice to have; without that, those systems, still quite workable if slow, wouldn't have anything unless one had an XVR-100 to put in them.) It's not just any one issue or one team, but the combination of proprietary 3rd-party hardware, lack of resources to get in-house hardware opened up, and lack of resources (and miscommunication) to get even an available driver for at least one old graphics board into a form that doesn't require someone to build Xorg for themselves, all that together is frustrating enough that I can certainly see how it might leave a bad impression. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
