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Comment by nathanb | Hacker News Reader

Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved.

I'm not even talking ideologically here. The OSS drivers are included along with the kernel in most distros. They're what you get by default when you boot a new Linux install. They get upgraded alongside other core packages by the distro's package manager and are generally quite up-to-date compared to the "official" drivers in the package repository (if they're even there at all).

I use the OSS radeon driver at home and the OSS nouveau driver at work, and both are quite adequate for my purposes (which involve no real 3D). I think it would be a bigger improvement to the ecosystem to have these drivers get some love.

(Or, alternately, for the proprietary drivers to go open-source and be included with the kernel).

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> Seems to me like a huger win would be if the open-source graphics drivers would get improved.

Their work with Intel is on the open source drivers.

Show me where I can buy an Intel graphics card. Please.

Near as I can tell, the only Intel display adapters are the ones integrated into laptop motherboards. You may be able to buy the occasional desktop motherboard with integrated Intel graphics, but good luck finding one that can support two DVI monitors or dual-link high-resolution displays or anything fancy like that.

However, the last I looked into this was a while back; perhaps the situation has improved?

Well, as of ~5 years ago, nobody except power users have desktop computers. Laptops have become the "default" type of computer, and almost all of those have a graphics chip integrated directly to the CPU, not to the motherboard like olden days.

Everyone I know thats in college or below has laptops this is true. But all my family and friends that are ~30+ and not working in IT have desktops at home. I can assure you none of them are power users.

They're not integrated into the motherboards, they're built directly into the CPU. This reduces power consumption and allows the motherboard to shrink, no separate component needed.

The HD4000 isn't the most capable chipset on the market but for most applications, light-duty use, it's fine. Even the basic versions of this chipset could support two 24" screens without much trouble. Just don't expect benchmark-shattering 3D performance.

nathanb: Yes, that would be ideal. The way I think about it is this: even though this effort falls far short of the ideal with NVIDIA and AMD, it's still a huge win for the platform.

My impression is that there are issues with 3rd party licensing of various sorts in the proprietary drivers that would prevent open sourcing them even if Nvidia/AMD wanted to.

Of course that probably doesn't prevent them from giving the OSS drivers some love, but that is another story.

The genesis of this was back in 2006 when Microsoft started requiring graphics board/chip makers to keep some aspects of their design secret, to support DRM in Vista. That includes hardware details and code, i.e. open source drivers. See http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

I'm actually quite glad that adequate drivers are available, even if they're not open source. That outcome wasn't guaranteed.

It goes further back than that. The software stack for all modern AMD GPUs is based on the original unified shader compiler for the first AMD unified shader GPU, Xenos (XBOX360) written largely by Microsoft. AMD just has a license to the code, MS still owns it.

Any sources for that software stack part? Only information I managed to find was that AMD was contracted to create Xenos core, but there was no mentions who made software (I would assume AMD) and especially no information about licensing.

nVidias argument for not opening up the Linux driver is that it shares a lot of code with the Windows driver. I'm not saying that this argument makes sense, but it's the one they use.

I don't understand why that prevents them from releasing the source? There's no reason the Windows driver need be closed-source.

That depends, how much of their competitive advantage over AMD is in software and how much of it is hardware?

Or at least documenting the hardware.

I might be waving hands here, but I got impression that actual components that do raw processing in GPU are not that complex. Complex part (and which produces the performance) is the pipeline feeding data into those units. GPUs are also programmable chips so even publishing driver that shows how graphic stack on GPU side is set up could potentially reveal whole architecture of that chip.

I thought their argument was that some non-trivial amount of code in their driver is licensed somehow and they're thus not free to open source it. It sharing code with the Windows driver is the explanation for how that code got into the Linux driver to begin with.

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