[Savage40] XGI, VIA Release Open Source Drivers

[Felix Kühling]

Am Montag, den 18.04.2005, 11:26 -0700 schrieb Tim Roberts:
> Luis wrote:
> 
> >Just read it on Slashdot,
> >
> >XGI, VIA Release Open Source Drivers
> >http://slashdot.org/articles/05/04/13/158226.shtml?tid=152&tid=104
> >
> >Quoting: "(...) VIA has announced [1] the immediate release of open source
> >drivers for S3 Graphics UniChrome, VIA ProSavage and ProSavage DDR."
> >
> >[1]http://www.via.com.tw/en/resources/pressroom/2005_archive/pr050412_driversource.jsp
> >
> >Hope that's as good news as it sounds. :-)
> >
> 
> Hard to say.  They released their own (so to speak) drivers for the rest 
> of the Savage line several years ago.  They took my last drop to them 
> (about 1.1.16) and forked off their own development from there.  I 
> merged in most of their source changes in the 1.1.23 timeframe.  I 
> suspect this is just an incremental release over that, although it's 
> hard to tell from the announcement.  It's not clear to me from the 
> announcement whether this includes OpenGL code.
>
> So, for the Savages at least, I'm not sure this gives us anything that 
> doesn't already exist in X.Org.
> 

[referring only to the Savage part, don't know much about Unichrome]

AFAICT this is exactly the code that was released to Alan Cox about 1
1/2 years ago. The current Savage driver with DRI support in Xorg CVS,
Mesa CVS and DRM CVS is based on this. The code VIA is re-releasing now
is mostly useless because it won't even compile in current Xorg or
XFree86 trees. Compared to the current driver in Xorg/Mesa/DRM it is
more buggy (without pretending the current driver to be free of
bugs ;-), less secure and supports DRI on a smaller range of hardware
(Savage 3D/IX/MX, Savage4 and SuperSavages had no DRI support by VIA's
code). There is also no new information for the development of the DRI
driver.

Regards,
  Felix

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| Felix Kühling <fxkuehl at gmx.de>                     http://fxk.de.vu |
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