Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset [LWN.net]

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 6:55 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset by elanthis
Parent article: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Ya.. moving the regulartory crap to the firmware was a very good move for Intel.

I wouldn't buy their devices if it required a propriatory blob, weither or not it existed as a kernel driver or daemon.

Firmware files, while I'd like to avoid, I can live with without complaint.

What we should be aiming for in vendors, though, is still specifications and/or avoid restrictive NDAs.

I can respect NDAs if the intention and purpose and effect is designed to protect things like manufacturing proccess, or future product releases.. Anything that is not nessicary to write drivers for the hardware.

Say if some Linux or X.org hacker wanted to add XVMC support to the Intel drivers...

Would Keith be allowed to help him with this? Would he be allowed to talk about it? Is that other developer going to be stuck pulling the old ATI and Nvidia game with reverse engineering the hardware and mucking around capturing traffic between the hardware and the Windows drivers?

Is that proper, so that your still not allowed to know how to operate the hardware, that developers can't talk about it, can't spread information or use their skills to help get support for other hardware?

So that's still distastefull for me. I care more then just about being able to redistribute source code, being able to communicate and share knowledge is very important, even potentially more important.

Although I'll take what I can get in terms of hardware support.

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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 13, 2007 4:29 UTC (Sun) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

> Say if some Linux or X.org hacker wanted to add XVMC support to the Intel drivers...

Of course I'd love for that to happen, our list of things we'd like to see the drivers do is fairly extensive. But, unless we can provide reasonable documentation, it's going to be really hard to break into a big new area of functionality like this. The current header files document what the driver uses, but not a lot beyond that.

What we are doing is trying to get some minimal XvMC support done this year so that the hardware functionality is reasonably well described in both code and comments. At that point, I'm hoping others will be able to help expand support for additional encodings, and other activities.

Any help we can get will be appreciated. Questions about specific chip operations that can be answered by consulting the specs are something I'd like to spend more time answering.