[haiku-development] Re: Hardware 3D....

> The reason to focus on them is purely because they provide drivers
> for
> other open source operating systems. Sure they're closed source, but
> as a end user of any system I'd rather have fully supported hardware
> than the source for alternative (often lesser) drivers. If they
> opened

Ethical reason appart, OSS drivers are often higher quality, because of
peer review. Plus you don't have to wait for a fix from the maker.
As for ATI, I always had problems in windows (98 at the time) with
official ATI drivers, and once I tried to update it and it wouldn't
boot anymore.
OTH, Slackware linux asked me 10 question and it just worked (no 3D but
I don't use it, and the rest was perfect).
In BeOS I only had some overlay overclocking that was fixed in Dano.
They do not know how to write a driver.
(and they should stick to gfx chips as they don't know how to make non-
buggy chipsets either).

> up the specification it would indeed be a welcome move, but just
> because they want to protect their information shouldn't be reason
> enough to avoid their support altogether.

Actually it is the most compelling reason to not support them.
They keep hiding behind "trade secret" arguments that don't stand
examination.
They only impair the work of FOSS driver writers, while that really has
near to no effect on competition.
You can be sure others in the market have a room full of people REing
each other chipset to find what's inside, they have the resources for
that.
So it really only pisses us.
Besides, another invalid reason is to hide the fact that their chips
have bugs so they must fix them in the driver. :D

> I don't mean to play down the work of the Haiku devs, truly their
> work
> has been staggering - but I do tend to wince when I read that some
> random old piece of hardware is now working well. Granted Haiku will
> be better than pretty much all other OSs at providing a good
> experience on old machines, but I'd expect 90% of the userbase to be
> using more modern hardware.

As was stated, we might also use the new Gallium3D architecture if
that's possible.
That would also allow working on more important stuff :)

François.

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