Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On 17 Jul 2003, William Suetholz wrote: When are the various different patches out there for ATI cards going to be integrated into XFree86 and DRI? I know of at least two different projects that are modifying these drivers. I'm not sure what specific patches you're refering to, but if you're refering to the DRI project and GATOS project, they're not patches. They are projects. The DRI code gets merged into XFree86 2-3 times a year or more depending on various factors, and happens as XFree86 development proceeds. The GATOS code is something which requires integrating both into the DRI project as it has DRI/DRM modifications that are required and which there are compatibility issues that need to be addressed, and it needs to be merged into XFree86 as well, and there are massive integration issues involved in order to do that as well. I believe the GATOS maintainer would like to see this happen, and I believe the DRI project and XFree86 project would also like to see it happen. It's not a simple 10 minute job however as I have investigated just how much work would need to be done to merge this everywhere and it is non-trivial. The XFree86 project, the DRI project, and the GATOS project are ran by volunteers with limited amount of spare time to work on things. The code for GATOS has largely not been merged into XFree86 because nobody has had the time to devote to doing it. So the answer to your first question is essentially This will get merged into XFree86 and DRI, etc. when an unpaid volunteer decides that it is interesting work to work on, and has time to devote to doing so, and other things going on at the time in development wont interfere. In short When someone has time. What's the deal with ATI's drivers? The binary ones, or the open source ones? Either way, your question isn't very clear. What's the deal doesn't mean a lot. Why couldn't they just help out with the existing drivers instead of reinventing the wheel? They do. The majority of the code that is contributed to the XFree86 open source 2D drivers for Radeon is contributed by ATI, and most of it written by Hui Yu at ATI. Other code contributions come from the DRI project, Michel Daenzer, myself, Kevin Martin, and numerous others. ATI generally contributes the code to support 2D on all new chipsets that come out, as well as providing various bug fixes in their patch sets. Since 4.3.0 was released, ATI has contributed approximately 18 major patches to the XFree86 project for the Radeon driver in the last 4 months approximately, of which support was added for 3D on Radeon 9200, and 2D support was added for Radeon 9200/9600/9800 and the Radeon IGP mobile chipsets, and others. You may wish to check the XFree86 CHANGELOG document which shows when these changes were checked into CVS by Kevin Martin along with some patches for Radeon by other devleopers. As for your statement reinventing the wheel and it's associated implication about why ATI has produced proprietary drivers and made them available for download, here is a clue for you. The binary drivers which were available on ATI's website were originally designed for high end workstation FireGL video hardware. These drivers have been available for a very long time for this high end hardware. Due to increasing demands from users to add support to their binary drivers for Radeon 8500, since the chip is essentially identical programmatically to the FireGL 8800 chips, ATI eventually made some changes to the driver to allow them to be used for the Radeon 8500 as well, however the drivers are unsupported - just like any company's drivers are unsupported on any OS platform. (Try calling any video hardware vendor on the telephone for *any* operating system, including Microsoft Windows and tell them your video card is crashing and you think it is a driver bug. Watch how fast every vendor out there will tell you that they do not provide end user support.) These drivers were provided more or less as-is to people in hopes that people find them useful, which is the same reason any other video hardware company who provides proprietary drivers to users in the community. The drivers are an alternative provided which in the cases of ATI and Nvidia at least, are based on their Windows driver code. From what I understand, the OpenGL code in both ATI and Nvidia's drivers is shared with their Windows/Mac and whatever other OS's they support. It's cross platform code they maintain for all OS's they choose to provide drivers for. The 2D driver is aparently not shared code, which makes sense as Windows and X driver models differ greatly. The kernel code would be custom code written for the given operating systems involved, and almost certainly written for high end high paying customers in the scientific and other high end 3D customers in the marketplace. In short, these drivers weren't written for gamers, or home users. They were
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 05:57:50AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote: What's the deal with ATI's drivers? The binary ones, or the open source ones? Either way, your question isn't very clear. What's the deal doesn't mean a lot. I think you are exagerating, it was perfectly clear what he did mean, at least from the rest of the context. The drivers are an alternative provided which in the cases of ATI and Nvidia at least, are based on their Windows driver code. From what I understand, the OpenGL code in both ATI and Nvidia's drivers is shared with their Windows/Mac and whatever other OS's they support. It's cross platform code they maintain for all OS's they choose to provide drivers for. The 2D driver is aparently not shared code, which makes sense as Windows and X driver models differ greatly. The kernel code would be custom code written for the given operating systems involved, and almost certainly written for high end high paying customers in the scientific and other high end 3D customers in the marketplace. Maybe they could have the whole X driver and kernel module in open source, and only keep the opengl library as proprietary stuff. I more or less doubt they have any IP involved in these part, at least some really meaningfull stuff. This would it make much easier for user installations too, i think. In short, these drivers weren't written for gamers, or home users. They were written for high end customers out there and merely provided for download by mortals as a convenience in hopes that people find them useful and benefit from them being there. Both ATI, Nvidia and any other company providing such drivers to the communtiy, could just very well stop doing it, and instead only include them in their high end workstation graphics hardware CDROMS for those scientific customers. Why do these companies not open source their complete drivers? Because they have intellectual property in their drivers that As if their concurent where not capable of reverse engineering the drivers. they don't want all of their competitors to just scoop up and use in their own drivers for free. They also likely have various pieces of code in their drivers that they did not write and do not own, but have licensed from a 3rd party. In short, they most likely have legal agreements on parts of their code that they can NOT release under open source licenses. By these companies contributing to open source drivers however (ATI contributes heavily to the radeon driver, and Nvidia to the nv driver), they are still contributing to the open source community, and they are providing users with an alternative to use that is outside of any legally binding agreements that code might contain in their own full proprietary drivers. I have no problem for them to go proprietary, but i would very much like a powerpc version of said drivers. Since both of them also release drivers for MacOSX, i guess this would not be very expensive to just rebuild powerpc versions of them. Or for other arches too. I think this is the cost the graphic companies have to pay for not releasing the source code. After all their drivers don't support XV at all, so you can't use the multimedia capabilities of some of their integrated cards like the AIW-PRO and 8500DV. I realize that in the past they have provided some information to XFree86, and eventually after having their multimedia stuff reverse engineered to the group that was working on that. They have, however, never provided complete information! They've got the right to do that if they wish. Suffice it to say I am not sure this is the case all over the world, and in any case it is hardly fair. If i buy a product, i also buy the right to use it fully. I am no lawyer, but i guess that if you where going to resort to legal action, the judge may well see it that way in at least some of the countries where graphic cards are used. that ATI has provided more documentation for their video hardware than all other vendors combined, at least the docs that I have had access to from all vendors. With people like you bitching about it however, I don't see how that is intended to get anyone to release any documentation or specifications that haven't been released. They could theoretically release all documentation to everything, open source their proprietary drivers, sell their company and donate the money to the XFree86 project, and people would still find something to bitch thanklessly about and complain about some bug they find. No, there you are exagerating. I hardly doubt that they would go broke or whatever if they released open source drivers. If anything, they would sell more boards. I really can't see the problem with these chip designers releasing information so there could be drivers written that can take advantage of ALL the features for the chips, and boards they produce! I'd love nothing
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Sven Luther wrote: Why do these companies not open source their complete drivers? Because they have intellectual property in their drivers that As if their concurent where not capable of reverse engineering the ^ competition somehow English chose another Latin word than the other Germanic languages -- the weirdness and hodge-podge nature of English strikes again :/ (this is not to spite Sven - merely to rant about English and at the same time increase the chances that an English-only speaker will understand) -Peter ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 12:44:46PM +0200, Peter Firefly Lund wrote: On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Sven Luther wrote: Why do these companies not open source their complete drivers? Because they have intellectual property in their drivers that As if their concurent where not capable of reverse engineering the ^ competition A, i have been searching for this word a few times already this last week, thanks. somehow English chose another Latin word than the other Germanic languages -- the weirdness and hodge-podge nature of English strikes again :/ (this is not to spite Sven - merely to rant about English and at the same time increase the chances that an English-only speaker will understand) Well, it would also be nice if the english only speaker would maybe be a bit more open when encountering non native english with a few problems in the text. Friendly, Sven Luther ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 12:25:16 +0200, Sven Luther wrote: Maybe they could have the whole X driver and kernel module in open source, and only keep the opengl library as proprietary stuff. I more or less doubt they have any IP involved in these part, at least some really meaningfull stuff. Unfortunately, interesting and meaningful are NOT among the criteria used by the US Patent and Trademark Office in awarding patents. The fact is most chip companies DO hold patents on some peculiar aspect of their chips, and they have to pretend to protect them in order to maintain their usefulness. Most people don't realize how much the patent business has turned from being an invention protector into one big Pokemon game. Company A decides to attack Company B. They lay down three of their patents in the Pokemon arena and say, AHA!, you violate these patents, please pay me a million a year or I'll sue. Company B goes back to their Pokedex, chooses three likely candidates from THEIR patent portfolio, and responsd AHA!, you are violating OUR patents! Sign this cross-licensing agreement or my Charizard's flame thrower attack will turn you to ashes. The two companies sign the agreement in order to avoid the court system, put their patents back into their Pokeballs, and life goes on. They have to have patents in order to make their Pokemon card deck strong enough to survive battles like that. Of course, this is all anathema to the open source and free software movements. This e-mail also demonstrates that my children have spent WAY too much time with Pokemon. -- - Tim Roberts, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Providenza Boekelheide, Inc. ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
how to set geometry for a window (from other program)?
Hi, I use twm and have to put initial window of mozilla into 0,0 position. But there's a bug in mozilla - it ignores geometry setting - this bug is filed but still not fixed. I did not find any means to set x,y in twm, so the question is whether there is a way to set geometry of window with some command? Or could somebody please paste a code which I can use to write my own to set it. Thanks, in advance, Andriy ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
Hello, Thank you all on the list for your responses.. It has been interesting. Mr. Harris, yes I am one of Those people who want a device to work in my chosen operating system, and have been frustrated that while things have gotten a bit better than they were in 1998, the OS and users that use it are still considered second class by the device manufactureres despite some very quiet lip service on the manufacturers part. Part of my attitude is from being involved in (mostly on the sidelines) in the initial project that grew into Gatos, and the stonewalling that was done at that time. Since that time ATI has donated hardware, and provided some documentation for the area that I am most interested in. Multimedia in case you hadn't guessed :-) I still am not able to use the DVD playback acceleration features, because the chopped that out of the docs. On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 04:57, Mike A. Harris wrote: On 17 Jul 2003, William Suetholz wrote: When are the various different patches out there for ATI cards going to be integrated into XFree86 and DRI? I know of at least two different projects that are modifying these drivers. I'm not sure what specific patches you're refering to, but if you're refering to the DRI project and GATOS project, they're not patches. They are projects. The DRI code gets merged into XFree86 2-3 times a year or more depending on various factors, and happens as XFree86 development proceeds. In my paragraph above I did call them projects. I was not really thinking about DRI, however I was thinking of Gatos, and the TV-Out stuff. --SNIP-- What's the deal with ATI's drivers? The binary ones, or the open source ones? Either way, your question isn't very clear. What's the deal doesn't mean a lot. I am not aware of any open source drivers directly available from ATI. As for your statement reinventing the wheel and it's associated implication about why ATI has produced proprietary drivers and made them available for download, here is a clue for you. -NASTY- I'm not totally stupid. --SNIP-- however the drivers are unsupported - just like any company's drivers are unsupported on any OS platform. (Try calling any video hardware vendor on the telephone for *any* operating system, including Microsoft Windows and tell them your video card is crashing and you think it is a driver bug. Watch how fast every vendor out there will tell you that they do not provide end user support.) Not entirely true.. I have gotten support from ATI in getting their stuff to work under NT and other MS systems. --SNIP-- After all their drivers don't support XV at all, so you can't use the multimedia capabilities of some of their integrated cards like the AIW-PRO and 8500DV. I realize that in the past they have provided some information to XFree86, and eventually after having their multimedia stuff reverse engineered to the group that was working on that. They have, however, never provided complete information! They've got the right to do that if they wish. Suffice it to say that ATI has provided more documentation for their video hardware than all other vendors combined, at least the docs that I have had access to from all vendors. With people like you bitching about it however, I don't see how that is intended to get anyone to release any documentation or specifications that haven't been released. They could theoretically release all documentation to everything, open source their proprietary drivers, sell their company and donate the money to the XFree86 project, and people would still find something to bitch thanklessly about and complain about some bug they find. On the other hand.. If more people who didn't want to have to run another OS to access features that are not well supported because of lack of knowledge on how to support them would comment/complain (oh alright -BITCH-) maybe the hardware vendors would realize that there is a viable market for their devices to be used on the second class OS's And, I'm sure that ATI has a file on me :-) I've been commenting on this directly to them for some time. --SNIP-- If I sound like the devil's advocate, I assure you I'm not. I'm just tired of hearing random people bitch and beak off about this type of crap who don't put any sort of thought whatsoever into the business, legal, copyright/trademark/patent, or engineering costs and other factors that affect these types of decisions in companies out there. Try to look at things from the angle of the given company out there for once. Yes I am a random person, and, I'm a nobody who must be a pretty terrible person to want to use something other than a MS supported product to utilize the features that the card was purchased for. And, I must never (in the 5-7 years I've been asking for this) have thought about the business side of things. I would actually be satisfied with Binary only drivers that
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
On Fri, Jul 18, 2003 at 06:09:44PM -0700, Mark Vojkovich wrote: Ironically, the Linux desktop community doesn't target the only potential business case there is. It's often at odds with it. Workstation users like a platform that doesn't change and anything that risks damaging OpenGL behavior (like RandR support or alpha blended cursors) is generally not well accepted. I guess this thread is getting offtopic, but fwiw, from what I can see of customers and other data this battle is already won. Linux is definitively cheaper and meets the technical need for just about everyone, where UNIX workstations are hanging on it's by inertia and due to certain ISVs. There are not a lot of additional features needed to win these customers, other than continuous performance gains. For the 3D performance gains everyone is basically 100% dependent on nvidia and ATI; if you guys make the improvements they're there, otherwise they aren't. Nobody else has the ability to address this issue that I know of. People are looking beyond this market, because the workstation market simply is not the largest in the scheme of things, and isolated by itself has little reason other than a body of in-house and ISV apps to be Linux-based rather than Windows- or Mac-based. The historical reason it was UNIX-based was the high end hardware; that reason is gone. This paper has some good points: http://www.osafoundation.org/desktop-linux-overview.pdf There is substantial interest in the world today in Linux as a desktop, and enough of that interest is among potentially paying customers who understand the technical realities. For now, granted, we're talking primarily about highly managed and locked-down desktops with a restricted application set. But for whatever reason, empirically many people want to use Linux for anything it's capable of doing, as soon as it's capable of doing it. If the X-based platform is to be capable enough for the current interest in managed desktops, and the few-years-out interest in more general desktops, we have to be making progress intelligently and continuously. That's how we're getting there on the server, it's how we got the workstation market, and it's how we'll get future markets. There isn't a business case here yet for nvidia, or for desktop ISVs. However, for the organizations looking at Linux desktops today, those things aren't essential; which gives a possible way out of the chicken-and-egg/bootstrap problem. There is already a business case for many operating system vendors and hardware OEMs, judging by their publicly-announced actions over the last year. Nobody can predict the future, of course. Many things can happen. I don't believe there is a fundamental tradeoff between what all these various customers want to do, from a technical standpoint. However, to properly balance all the competing requirements, looking at the client-side GUI platform as a whole rather than as any single unit (window system, desktop shell, toolkits, applications) will be important. Fluidity and adaptation are essential, properly balanced with regular ABI-stable releases. Havoc ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
Re: Rant (was Re: ATI Drivers.)
TR Unfortunately, interesting and meaningful are NOT among the TR criteria used by the US Patent and Trademark Office in awarding TR patents. The European Parliament intends to discuss in September Arlene McCarthy's bill that aims to put European patent law in step with its American counterpart. If you agree with Tim and happen to live in the EU, please do write a friendly note to your Euro-MP before September. General page on software patents in the EU (including calendar): http://swpat.ffii.org An article by McCarthy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0%2C3605%2C970294%2C00.html RMS' rebuttal: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0%2C3605%2C975126%2C00.html Sorry for the offtopic post. Juliusz ___ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
