Linux drivers are coming...

[leech]

What about this posting here, Wombat? https://www.lug.udel.edu/pipermail/l...ay/002900.html

I hope what you say about Matrox being bastards to the Open-Source community is wrong or changing for the better.

Leech

[Wombat]

He's going off of his experience with the G400. Poor guy.

[mallowman]

Originally posted by Ribbit

Perhaps the G400Max I just got hold of will be my last Matrox card. Damn. And I really wanted FAA...

From the way things are going it looks as though the G4x0 will be your last video card from any manufacturer that has all the features of the hardware supported by an open source driver.

Everyone's IP about their hardware is too valuable to risk open source drivers.

[leech]

I completely understand the "Open-Source drivers are the best" mentality. BUT if Matrox continues on their current course (Partially open-source, with some binary-only parts) I won't be too upset. The best argument for completely OpenSource is that if the company disappears or otherwise stops supporting the hardware, I think that if the hardware is that old/unsupported by the company, that they SHOULD release ALL specs. Then the OSS could develop them to their hearts content! I believe 3dfx did this.

My question is, will they have total closed source drivers because they don't want the 'cat-out-of-the-bag' on how they do 10-bit color? And also will they create a 10-bit color plugin for the Gimp? Also INDEPENDANT triple head support in linux would ROCK! In windows there's not as much point, but in linux, with different workspaces, and viewports or whatever they want to be called, it would be VERY cool to have that set-up. Especially if you could mix up the bit-depth and resolution of each screen.

Leech

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by leech
...I think that if the hardware is that old/unsupported by the company, that they SHOULD release ALL specs. Then the OSS could develop them to their hearts content! I believe 3dfx did this.

The trouble is, this almost never happens. You're right about 3dfx, but then nVidia bought them and took the specs down.

And anyway, why should the release of specs be delayed until the hardware is half-obsolete or worse? Release them when they're most useful! The G400 specs were released very quickly after the actual hardware. The most obvious result of this is that the G400 is the best-supported card in XFree86 by a long way. Did that spec release hurt Matrox in any way?

My question is, will they have total closed source drivers because they don't want the 'cat-out-of-the-bag' on how they do 10-bit color?

How hard can that be? Just set a couple of bits in a couple of registers, and be aware that the frame-buffer format has changed. What great secret has been given away there? As I pointed out earlier, there's already 10-bit code in XFree86 for other chips whose manufacturers weren't/aren't so overly secretive.

And also will they create a 10-bit color plugin for the Gimp?

That would be for the Gimp guys to do, not Matrox.

Also INDEPENDANT triple head support in linux would ROCK! In windows there's not as much point, but in linux, with different workspaces, and viewports or whatever they want to be called, it would be VERY cool to have that set-up. Especially if you could mix up the bit-depth and resolution of each screen.

Yes it would, but unfortunately the triplehead is done out of a single large framebuffer, so your different depths and resolutions aren't going to happen. Maybe future Parhelias will address this.

Leech

[WyWyWyWy]

Matrox MUST NOT totally open its driver, because not all technologies in it are theirs. IIRC, Macrovision is one of the technologies that makes MGA HAL lib unable to go opensource.

[leech]

You're right about that, WyWyWyWy. Damn Macrovision. I say screw 'em, there's always away around that stuff anyhow. Either way, I think it would be best and everyone I think will agree, if they just open source as much as much as they can AND develop their own in-house drivers, as well as letting people work on and help develop them. That way we can get those Matrox-specific extensions in. It'd sure be nice to see some OpenGL 2 drivers. Ah hell, I don't know what I"m talking about, I'm half asleep. Laters

Leech

[kewlcat]

Matrox and Linux

Matrox supports Linux using 2 different methods. For 2D, their cards have been very supported by XFree86, and they have developed in-house drivers for things like Dualhead, where IP is at stake.

As for 3d, all development has been by the open-source community. Luckily Matrox released the G200 specs early, which meant that it was one of the first cards to have accelerated OpenGL in Linux using the utah-glx drivers. This translated into good support for the G400 as well. The DRI drivers were developed by PI/VA Linux.

Going by past history, I expect that Matrox will release 2D drivers for Parhelia that support features like Triplehead and perhaps the Linux version of PowerDesk. I am not sure that they have the experience or resources to develop the 3D driver in-house -- we can only hope for some DRI developer to roll up his sleeves and do that for us. Note that this last paragraph is complete conjecture, and I have no knowledge of what the actual situation is.

-Rahul

[foft]

<p>Remember that Matrox have not released any specs since the G400. i.e. no details of G450 or G550 are known. Also the specs for the G400 are still incomplete in many ways... They suddently stopped talking to all OS developers -> maybe they were doing more support than desired and it was proving costly? Who knows, since they won't say. AFAIK no manufacturer releases decent specs these days. A far cry from the days when this kind of info would be in the product manual (e.g. my old Citizen 120D printer!). A real shame that programming hardware is now only possible by working for the company in question.</p>
<p>Anyway I'm happy with my binary only GeForce 3 linux drivers for now. Great image quality on this board too BTW before you dismiss this msg as just a troll, I did really like Matrox in the G400 days. Even did a little driver for BeOS!
</p>

[leech]

DRI is now being done by Tungsten graphics. This is only a guess, but from the product specs of the Parhelia, it seems to me that it will be matrox that is making their own driver. Remember that they only really have to port over their OpenGL driver for linux. Hopefully now that they're part of the OpenGL ARB they can get it just right and we'll all be playing Neverwinter Nights in our OS of choice. I do realize that a lot of people want Open-source drivers so that they can be assured to be able to run on ANY *nix type OS, but for me personally, I only run Linux. FreeBSD didn't like me too much and I had no specific reason to try to make it work. Pretty much though most of this is just 'what-if's' and 'why-nots' I personally just hope that they at least release the 2D driver soon (wether it's from Matrox or the XFree86-dev team, doesn't matter) at least then I wouldn't have to stare at this horrible UN-operating system of WindowsXP.

Leech

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by leech
Either way, I think it would be best and everyone I think will agree, if they just open source as much as they can AND develop their own in-house drivers, as well as letting people work on and help develop them.

Absolutely 100% agree, as long they pick "as much as they can", or rather "what they can't" carefully. And yes, Macrovision and friends can't die soon enough for me either.

BTW Kewlcat - I think dualhead is doable with the standard XFree86 distribution. The binary library has the code for the DVI outputs. Haig told me on the Matrox forum that the DVI-out is optimised to keep the signal integrity at long distances (like, getting on for a kilometre), and that's why they keep it closed. I don't see how this is anything other than a hardware feature, but what do I know...

There's another reason apart from platform-independence that having source/specs is important to some of us - it gives us some measure of independence from the hardware manufacturer. If you happen to have MPlayer around, look in the docs for their nVidia rant to see an example of what I mean. Essentially, nVidia's X drivers have some serious bugs which affect video playback, and the company refuses to fix them or even acknowledge their existance. This would be a non-issue if there was source/specs (unless the hardware itself was screwed). Imagine you bought a GeForce xyz because you heard the Linux support was good, and you're now trying to play videos with it....

Did anyone else here own an Apple ][? The manual came with assembler listings for the ROM, and - get this - complete schematic diagrams! Imagine that happening today.