Open Sourcing Drivers?

[GehRehmee]

http://forums.gagames.com/forums/For...ML/000083.html

Opinions, please?

[tohoward]

Although you make all the standard open source arguments, I haven't seen *driver* support for a peripheral that was open source (O/S) that was *better* than vendor support. That doesn't mean it's not possible, just that I haven't seen it. On the variety of hardware I own, O/S support is as good as or worse than vendor support.

Frankly, I *WANT* the vendor of my peripheral to support whatever operating systems (OS) I choose to use, in a manner consistant with that OS. I don't expect (or want) source code for win9x, I just want Good, Fast, Stable drivers (which Matrox FINALLY saw fit to deliver a year late). I'd expect O/S drivers for Linux, since all of Linux is O/S.

The fact that nVidia supports O/S linux drivers as well as Win9x drivers has basically made my choice of next video card. I'm sure there are alot more like me. Given *THAT*, it would make alot of sense to O/S their drivers, and they'd be certain to gain some "mindshare" from such a move. If Matrox released OpenGL support for Linux (open source) I *MIGHT* be tempted to forgive them for the G200 fiasco, but that would be about the only thing they could do to get me back in their camp.

In summary: drivers now, for O/S's I use now, in a manner consistant with the O/S.

Todd

[howard33]

In theory this sounds good, but what you have to realize is that one of the most difficult things in the computer industry software-wise is writing hardware drivers. A guy I currently work with wrote and debugged compilers for Cray research for years, another very difficult skill, and before that wrote hardware drivers, and he said it was the biggest bitch in the world to write hardware drivers for about thousand different reasons. They could open-source their drivers, but there wouldn't be a whole lot of people out there who could add very much to the code, that I can guarantee you. There's a reason it takes so long for the most part to make quality drivers for hardware- mainly because it's a bitch.

[Ashley]

I have to wonder whether people praising NVidia's release of "Open Source" Linux drivers have ever bothered to actually *look* at the source. It essentially turns an Nvidia card into nothing more than a simple SVGA frame buffer; aside from a couple of CRTC extension registers, not a single proprietary NV register is touched on.

NVidia registers remain secret and unavailable to anyone except their first-tier customers. Matrox at least has made their register databooks available online, to practically anyone interested. Third-parties can write a driver for the G400 that exploits its features. The same cannot be said for an NVidia chip.