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It is not that simpleIt is not that simplePosted Apr 25, 2006 20:31 UTC (Tue) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)Parent article: Some notes on Linux and free drivers
While I agree that the drivers should be open and everybody would benefit from that, I want to empahisze the point that writing a modern graphics driver is really extremely complicated, more so than commonly assumed. In my opinion it is much more complicated than any other driver in the kernel, by far. Besides the 3D math and the issue of performance, there are countless hardware bugs, workarounds, microcode programs, independant DMA channes, interrupts, etc.
There is another problem too. Hardware manufacturers cannot produce open documentation for their chips for the simple reasons that they don't have it themselves. It would require significant resources on their part to maintain accurate up-to-date public documentation of everything.
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