> Unfortunately, we just don't have the resource within > the SPARC graphics > group to spend any time on all the work that is > required to open source > the drivers for obsolete SPARC hardware.
After consideration, I'm really ok with that, given the AMD/ATI opening of their graphics chips programming specs. Who wants an 8 year old video board when todays boards are much more performant and have open specs. > We have > barely enough resource > to adequately support current Sun customers on the > graphics cards that > we OEM from AMD and Creative Labs. I have asked those > companies if we > could explore open source for these drivers (their > confidential > information was used in providing hardware > acceleration), but neither is > willing, at present, to do so. Given the fact that AMD/ATI has opened the specs for a majority of their graphics chipsets (I don't know the extent, but the open source community doing radeon and radeonhd appear to be doing cartwheels) which include XVR-100 and XVR-300, seems to me this is a no-brainer. Obviously, only PCI boards could be used on the older Sparc HW (Ultra 5/10/30/60/80/1000/2000/1500/2500) but PCI-E would be an option for Sparc HW that supports PCI-E. The obvious issue is that none of those ATI boards have OpenBoot bios so they could not be a primary framebuffer, so development would probably require a supported frame buffer along with the unsupported one. And given the fact that radeon and radeonhd are integrated drivers, we can benefit from the opensource community continuing to develop these drivers in parallel. This message posted from opensolaris.org
