Linda Fellingham wrote:
> Alan,
>
> Re the second 1) below:
>
> If you provide DPA support for x.org, then we can provide the software
> OpenGL pipeline.
>
> The binaries ARE redistributable.
>
> Note that if the resource (engineering and legal) for doing the work
> to open source the non-3D party graphics cards were provided, then it
> would be relatively straightforward to do so, and I would be very
> supportive of that.
This would be a huge boon, in that it would allow 3rd party OpenGL
vendors to provide binary compatible solutions for SPARC. This has huge
ramifications (many millions of dollars) for military based solutions.
Please do whatever it takes to make this happen.... not going down this
road and keeping everything closed (with no future roadmap, and no
options suitable for IHVs) will ultimately cost Sun 10's or 100's of
millions of dollars!
Note that for the 3rd party solutions that were developed at 3DLabs!, I
believe that I've spoken with folks at 3DLabs that say they would be
quite amenable to opensourcing any of the drivers. I think it is mostly
a matter of getting the legal teams from both companies to agree... At
this point I've always felt that the sticking point was SPARC graphics
group... I even offered to assist in getting release information from
3DLabs at one point in the not too distant past.
I've been out of touch with my contact, and no longer have those e-mail
addresses (I had to give them back to my previous employer when I quit)
but I'm pretty sure I could renew the contact (perhaps with General
Dynamics' help) if you're willing to follow through on the Sun end.
As far as engineering resource... I think there are probably more than
just one or two engineers who would be more than willing to work, on
their own time, within Sun, towards this goal. The legal resource I
can't answer, but I hope Glynn or one of the Indiana managers can step
up here.
-- Garrett
>
> Linda
>
>
> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>> So, now that I've bored everyone to sleep, this leaves us with these
>>> possibilities for Indiana on SPARC:
>>>
>>> 1) Ship Xsun binaries & existing SPARC Xsun driver binaries (all closed
>>> source)
>>>
>>> 2) Ship Xorg & use Martux's SPARC graphics drivers (all open source)
>>> with existing SPARC kernel driver binaries (all closed source)
>>
>> There is also a third choice I forgot to mention, probably since it's
>> the least desirable of all:
>>
>> 3) Ship Xorg with only the drivers provided by SPARC graphics (of which
>> only XVR-2500 is likely to be done by your October proposed
>> timeline),
>> and leave those with older SPARCs unable to run X in Indiana.
>>
>> Also, Garrett reminded me of another issue in a message to
>> ogb-discuss [1]
>> - my prior description only covered 2D graphics, and ignored
>> OpenGL. For
>> OpenGL, a similar choice will have to be made:
>>
>> 1) Ship existing SPARC OpenGL, with accelerated modules for existing
>> SPARC graphics cards (closed source - and I don't know if it's
>> redistributable) - with Xsun, this has acceleration for most of the
>> mid-to-high end SPARC graphics cards, with Xorg, only XVR-2500 is
>> known to have usable hardware acceleration - I don't know if the
>> others will easily work with Xorg or not once the framework is in
>> place.
>>
>> 2) Ship open source Mesa OpenGL, as we do on x86 (and virtually all
>> other
>> open source OS'es do), accepting that we'll have no hardware
>> acceleration
>> and break compatibility with existing SPARC OpenGL applications
>>
>> [1]
>> http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/ogb-discuss/2007-June/001033.html
>>
>
>
