VIA and Openchrome; Graphics Programming Manuals

Coinciding with FreedomHEC in Taipei, VIA has announced its cooperation with OpenChrome and releases Graphics Programming Manuals.

This definitely marks a big milestone in VIA's new, much more FOSS friendly Linux support. Not only releasing the source code to VIA's own graphics driver, but actually interoperating with OpenChrome to help to create one future driver base and fight against the fragmentation of the developer and user base.

After all, there's probably no other family of GPU's where there are so many different Linux/Xorg drivers like VIA's. What a terrible waste of R&D resources to reinvent the wheel over and over again. One reason for doing that (VIA's driver being closed source) has disappeared when it was made open source a couple of months ago.

So let's hope that this cooperation will be as successful as possible, and we can have one unified driver codebase with the cumulative features of both individual drivers right now. Once that has been done, we can start to think about helping the result to get into mainline X.org and put the entire history to rest.

I also appreciate and welcome the release of the graphics programming manuals for the two most recent generations of integrated graphics chips. Sure, they are by no means as exhaustive as documentation of major competitors in the GPU market - but then, VIA is a small company and they cannot release documentation which never even existed in the first place. So please accept that VIA is working on releasing the documentation it has, but is unlikely to be able to work on creating additional documentation that doesn't even exist.

There are still some things to be done, though. We still cannot include MPEG/H.263/H.264 hardware acceleration support in the driver due to unresolved legal issues (working on that, don't worry) and there is still no open source 3D support for the Chrome9 core (VX800 chipset). But then, life would be simple if all of those problems would disappear overnight. In any case, I think VIA can now legitimately claim that it is moving in the right direction, that it is not only trying to become a much better 'Free and Open Source Citizen'.

There will be more manuals and code up for release at some point, but please excuse that I simply don't want to speak about the tentative schedule of things that haven't happened yet.

Installing Linux on systems that boot from SD card

It seems like boot-from-SD is about to become as standard in the x86 world as boot-from-USB currently is. This is generally good news. Also, the need for OS integration is minimal, as it just uses the usual BIOS ABI on doing disk reads.

However, the initrd's shipped by all distributions don't contain the SDHCI driver, and all the installers that I've seen don't support installation on /dev/mmcblk*

I've now filed bugs for all the major distributions about this issue, and you can find more information at this wiki page on installing Linux on a bootable SD card. Let's hope that the distro's consider this feature important enough to add support to it to their next releases to make sure at the time the users buy this kind of hardware they can install the then-existing versions of those distributions.

Updates to VIA HDA Codec driver

The last two days I was busy preparing a patchset with various updates against the linux-2.6/sound/pci/hda/patch_via.c driver for HDA Codecs.

The resulting patchset has now been posted at alsa-devel and I'm waiting for the fallout from that.

The other bit that I'm currently playing is boot-from-SDcard support, apparently a feature that major BIOS vendors have in their new releases and which will become more common with upcoming mainboards and laptop devices, just like boot-from-USB in the past.

FAQs to the VIA open source driver

There have been numerous questions regarding the recent open source release of VIA's 2D Xorg driver.

Why did VIA publish yet another driver, rather than improving any of the existing Xorg/openchrome/unichrome drivers?
Because this driver is all but new! It was the base for all the binary-only driver releases that VIA has made (and is still making) for select Linux distributions. So rather than having written a new driver, this is just the disclosure of an existing driver.

One of the commonly asked questions is _why_ not the complete source, including codec acceleration, TV out and 3D was published. I cannot disclose the particular reasons for VIA, sorry. But I can comment on the general reasons on why companies cannot disclose certain source code. As you may have noticed, the situation with regard to the ATI driver e.g. shows certain similarities.... Usually there are some parts of the code, particularly for the 3D driver, which cannot be disclosed due to either

• parts of the source code are under a proprietary license from a 3rd party
• parts of the source code refer to technologies (e.g. macrovision) which are subject to very strong NDA's by the licensor, which in turn prohibit the open documentation or distribution in source code form

Will VIA learn to build a community around that new driver? Will there be mailing lists and a public revision control system?
As of now, this is unlikely. Not because VIA doesn't believe in the community, but rather because the disclose of VIA's source now enables everyone involved to look at all the available drivers. Some consensus has to be found on which driver is best to be used as a base for a future Xorg mainline driver, and then the community and VIA can work together on merging bits from other drivers into that base. Creating VIA's own mailing lists (and community) would lead to more fragmentation, rather than unification.

VIA releases open source Xorg driver

VIA has just released a open source Xorg driver for their integrated graphics chips on their linux.via.com.tw portal. Here's the actual download link for the source code tarball.

I am very happy to see this! It's one more step that VIA has been working on to improve and show their support for Free Software and Linux.

Please notice that this driver (as opposed to VIA's proprietary binary-only Xorg driver) has no support for 3D, hardware video codec or TV encoder support. Nevertheless, it is a big step ahead.

Of course everyone involved understands that this simple "code drop" is not enough and that it is just the first step for actual 'Free Software integration'. There is a lot to be done to harmonize the current FOSS driver landscape for VIA's graphics products, from the old via driver in the Xorg git tree, over the unichrome and openchrome and now this new driver. Stay tuned!

Back to Taipei: More work with VIA.

I've just arrived in Taipei two days ago. I'm looking forward to an exciting four weeks of close work with VIA, talking with various different groups in management as well as actual software engineers.

I can only repeat my earlier statements: It still feels great to be able to play such a substantial role in improving the Free Software interaction of a large chip maker and key player in the PC industry.

Of course being in Taipei also enables me to meet again with former colleagues at OpenMoko. I just returned from a very nice dinner conversation with jserv.

Small update on my VIA related work

I know there are many curious readers about what is happening at VIA with regard to Free Software. There are many things that I cannot talk about, but I can still state how excited I am by my new role, and how many (some big, some mall) steps I have managed to make during the short time that I'm working with VIA now.

The last week was mainly talking to various FOSS developers that have written or are maintaining existing Linux drivers for VIA hardware, like Ethernet, I2C, SATA/RAID, AGP, DRM/DRI and others. I have been able to provide hardware reference manuals that some of them have been trying to get their hands on for a long time (even willing to sing and NDA). VIA has also starting to offer reference hardware to selected Linux developers.

I'll be back to Taipei in roughly three weeks (August 21st) and am looking forward to the many interactions with Product Managers and Developers. Meanwhile, I'll continue to have conf calls at weird times and sending tons of emails back and forth, trying to establish the right contacts, getting the right people to talk to each other, etc.

So far I have resisted the temptation to touch a lot of the code. But I think I will not be able to resist very long ;) Right now I just don't want to step onto anyones toes (and/or duplicate work), no matter whether in the community or inside VIA.

Becoming VIA Open Source Liaison

Today, VIA made public what I've already been doing behind the scenes for some time: I've been contracted and appointed to be VIA's Open Source Liaison. As first part of the process, they've released the Padlock programming guide and the CX700/VX700 integrated north+southbridge manuals on linux.via.com.tw.

This basically means that I'll be helping VIA with improving their strategy for Open Source support, such as Open Source driver support, merging those drivers into the respective mainline projects as well as working on publicly available reference documentation for their hardware.

This is an incredible chance to contribute my part to help a major manufacturer of CPU, Chipset, Ethernet, WiFi, Card Reader and PC Graphics components understand what it takes to interact properly with the Free Software community. This is a big learning experience for VIA, and a teaching experience on my part, of course. I feel very happy to be able to work in such a key position, and to be able to put all my knowledge about Linux driver development, the development process, the FOSS community values/ethics/practises as well as licensing related knowledge at work.

VIA is truly interested to learn, and they're already doing a lot internally which you might not have been aware about. I am well aware of many of the historic problems between VIA and the community, related to binary only drivers, not cooperating with mainline development, suboptimal press announcements with little action, etc.

I'm very confident that together we can move beyond this and take a fresh start for much better FOSS support of VIA products. Of course the change will not come overnight. It's a process, and it involves many groups in a large company, each group with their own management, R&D and so on. So please bear with us, and don't expect all drivers to be finished in mainline quality tomorrow.

If you are a Free Software developer and you have some comment/feedback/demand to via, please feel free to contact me (preferably at HaraldWelte@viatech.com. I will try my best to follow-up with all those comments. If you are missing some piece of documentation for hardware or have some other issue, please let me know. I do care, and I will take up the issue with VIA's management.