Re: Phil meet y-devel; y-devel meet Phil

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> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Monday 19 July 2004 02.30 skrev Andrew Suffield:
> >> <shrug> Your own silly fault for buying the wrong
> >> hardware. Reverse-engineer it if you really care.
> >
> > Hmm, pardon me if I'm wrong, but isn't there a rabid
> > manufacturer of graphics
> > chips out there that threatens to sue everyone who tries to
> > make a driver for
> > their chip?
> I wonder which one. Hmmm... Rabies....
Unfortunately I can't seem to find an old news item I read about 1.5 years 
ago, I think it was on http://www.xig.com. It suggested that Xig once tried 
to get the hardware specs from nVidia in order to support it in their 
AX-product but were, as expected, denied access to the specifications. 
According to the article, Xi Graphics then proceeded by using the specs found 
in XFree86 as a starting-point, and then reverse-engineered the rest in order 
to get a decent beta-level support for amongst other cards, the GeForce2. The 
article suggested that Xi graphics were then contacted by nVidia, warning 
them not to reverse-engineer their Intellectual Property, threating to file a 
lawsuit unless the support was dropped.

This article, coming from Xi Graphics should of course be considered with a 
healthy doze of scepticism. But what CAN be seen today is that there are no 
support whatsoever for GeForce cards in Xig:s X-server. Not even the basic 
support that could easily be added by the information found in the nv-driver 
from XFree86, that seems to be ok with nVidia. And if you trust my word and 
my memory, I know I saw both this article, as well as beta-support for 
GeForce2, and a note about all this at the page 
http://www.xig.com/Pages/Atop/HardwareSupportInSummit/NVIDIAsupport.html
Somehow it seems to have magically disappeared. :-/

Well, well. I guess we'll all have to stick to the damn binary, proprietary, 
sucky nvidia.ko kernel module, along with a black-box XFree-driver.

Personally, I'm considering to try out the new Radeon cards, and see what ATI 
have been up to this years. I'm probably in for disappointment, but since I'm 
used to the nVidia-drivers, I think I can take it. Anyone running a somewhat 
fresh Radeon-card under Linux (and 2.6) that can tell me how it's working for 
you?

Regards
/ Ulrik
- -- 
All men have the right to wait in line.
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