Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Mon, 4 Aug 2008, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > >> Unfortunately, graphics vendors are notoriously secretive, and none have >> been willing to release Sun from our NDAs, so we're not allowed to share >> the sources to our drivers for any recent hardware (pretty much anything >> made in the past 5-7 years since Sun stopped designing our own and became >> simply an OEM of graphics cards from ATI & 3DLabs - including all cards >> for the PCI & PCI-Express busses). >> > > Video cards (particularly for PCI) should be pretty cheap now and > likely perform better with Xorg than Sun's expensive OEMed cards. > How about adopting the approach where one well supported PCI video > card design is offered with hardware and open-sourced driver support? > Sun could assure a channel (to benefit its customers) by reselling the > card for some period of time. Customers obtain continued support and > more performance as well. It may be that legacy system firmware may > be the main issue here since it needs to be able to draw console text > using the new card. > > Bob > ====================================== > Bob Friesenhahn > bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ > GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org > quite aware of this, but the video bios firmware on off-the-shelf cards is of no use in a SPARC machine.
Stuart
