OT: nVidia driver [was: Wish list] -- understanding the GPU market

[Dave Jones]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 11:43:36PM -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
 > nVidia just adds some kernel memory and AGPgart interfaces.

Plus god knows what else. Take a look at the size of the binary
part of their driver. It's (to the best of my knowledge) the
largest kernel module available for Linux.

 > Until recently, those were Intel "trade secrets" nVidia could not
 > disclose.

I'm not sure where you're getting this.

 > ATI should be commended for attempting to make a "clean room" DRI/
 > GLX implementation.  But eventually they had to give in

The r200 work was actually done by precision insight, under
sponsership from The Weather Channel, not ATI.

 > The concept that leading-edge video drivers will _ever_ be GPL is 
 > very slim-to-none.

The folks reverse engineering the r300 cores have come along in leaps
and bounds. From what I hear it's good enough to play quake and such
already.  Having to reverse engineer the hardware does mean we're
at best going to be one generation of card behind though, but the
picture isn't totally bleak..

 > In reality, yes, I'd like to see nVidia's memory interfaces in the
 > kernel GPL'd.  And now that the _standard_ PCI-Express is here from
 > the PCI Standards Group (AGP was _never_ a standard, but an Intel
 > trade secret of PCI)

If you mean this in the sense "Was never a standard that PCI-SIG made
people pay for to see", you are correct. But there was nothing secret
about it at all. The fact that it was freely downloadable was one of the
reasons that Linux ended up with agpgart support so quickly.

		Dave