What makes a production kernel?

[alan]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Paul Gear wrote:

> All of this is beside the point i was trying to make: many people have
> an existing investment in NVIDIA & ATI, and even if they wanted to swap
> to something more Linux friendly, it would mean a big performance drop
> and a new motherboard.

Or a new laptop.  Better yet, try finding a laptop that has an acceptable 
video chipset that is not nVIDIA or ATI.  (Trident is not acceptable, not 
even to dentists who chew gum.)  I wish Matrox had a chipset for laptops, 
but I have yet to see it.  (And probably never will...)

Is there a reasonably fast chipset that will give an acceptable framerate 
for OpenGL and has open source drivers?  Other than Matrox (and some will 
argue on the OpenGL part) i don't know of any.