Re: Native mode handling

Hi Jon,

> Will the complete Radeon driver be L/GPL?

Unfortunately no, due to our NDA's with ATI. Any of the Open Source 3D 
driver code will be released with source code, but any code for the R300 
chipsets will have to be closed due to the NDA we are under with ATI in 
order to receive the R300 DDK information.

> What about NVidia?

Nope. We asked NVIDIA a while back about whether we could Open Source 
some old code we had, and the response we got back was "Don't even try, 
you couldn't afford the laywers fees".

> How is your mode support compared to xfree? xfree has DD1, DDC2,
> Int10, Vesa, files, etc. 

All that is completely take care of and is completely plug and play. We 
fully support DDC2 (not DDC1 since it is so old), Int 10 support, VESA 
fallbacks etc etc. All our drivers have a complete ANSI C runtime at 
their disposal (even C++ and math library!), and with the latest updates 
we just did with the Open Watcom 1.2 compiler we can now completely debug 

all our drivers entirely at the source code level ;-)

> What about allocating framebuffer memory? This is going to change a
> lot with the compositing driver. 

All framebuffer management is handled by our 'buffer manager', which 
allows you to create buffers in video memory with either linear or 
rectangular allocation. The allocating code doesn't care how it is done, 
but the memory is just managed for them. You can allocate fixed buffers, 
moveable buffers, buffers with a system memory cache, pageable buffers, 
assign buffer priorities for LRU paging etc. 

As it stands right now we do not use the buffer manager in our XFree86 
drivers, because XFree86 has a really terrible offscreen memory manager 
in it (as I am sure you know ;-). One of the projects we are working on 
right now is to completely bypass all the buffer management code in our 
next gen XFree86 drivers such that our buffer manager will handle 
everything. That is vitally important because without our buffer manager 
hooked in, our drivers cannot allocate private buffers for internal use 
(color cursors, buffers for generic acceleration options etc), and the 3D 

and video engines also cannot hook into the system and allocate private 
buffers for their own use. 

ce the buffer manager is hooked in, a compositing window manager could 
easily hook into the same buffer manager mechanism to allocate and 
manager buffers for the window objects and compositing etc.

> Are you more in the business of writing drivers for manufacturers?
> or is retail driver sales your focus? 

Both actually, although retail sales is not something we are planning to 
attack again any time soon. We develop our drivers to license to software 

developers (Enterprise and Embedded/Industrial customers), as well as to 
large companies like IBM for their OS/2 platform. To date most hardware 
manufacturers have not been interested in licensing the drivers 
themselves, but rather pointing their customers directly at us to license 

them directly. That may change however with the new PowerPC port we have 
nearly completed and our push into the Embedded/Industrial space.

Also note that hopefully early next year we will be wrapping up a project 

we are working on that will allow single user versions for a single OS 
and chipset to be downloaded compeletly free of charge. I can't really 
say much more about that project, except that when you see what we have 
coming, I think you will like it. It will also enable much more 
widespread use of our drivers by individuals as it will be completely 
free for personal use.

> BTW, I was heavily involved with Powersoft/Watcom during the
> Internet bubble right after the Sybase acquisition. 

Really? I had no idea. Have you been keeping up with the latest Open 
Watcom work? We have the basic Linux version already working, and expect 
the final version to be completed sometime early next year. IMHO Open 
Watcom on Linux will be the best Open Source compiler available for that 
platform, as it has incredible cross platform development and debugging 
support.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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