(Crowd funded) fix for SiS 671/771 video cards

[Dave Airlie]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 1:55 AM, Alan Coopersmith
<alan.coopersmith at oracle.com> wrote:
> On 05/12/13 03:16 AM, Connor Behan wrote:
>>
>> If you mean included with an Xorg katamari, there is probably no point.
>> Most distros package individual components. As for why some drivers like
>> these need to be downloaded from unofficial git repos while other
>> drivers that are equally old have official git repos on freedesktop.org?
>> I don't know why that is.
>
>
> The repos on freedesktop.org are the drivers that either originated from
> X.Org (most originally from XFree86 before the fork) or which the authors
> have asked us to host in our repos for collective development, allowing
> X.Org developers to update the drivers when they change the server API.
>
> I'd actually never heard of this xf86-video-sis671 before this thread,
> so presumably the author likes keeping it separate, hidden, and fully
> their responsibility to keep working.
>

What happened went something like, Xorg SiS driver maintained by Thomas,
then he had a premium version that he used to sell, when he gave up I think
he might he code dropped the premium one but not in our tree or something.

Then SiS forked an old version of the X.org one for the 671, released
a megapatch
containing pieces of support for the chip and maybe pieces of the
premium codebase,

I spent a day once trying to create a sensible set of patches to get
from a to b,
and put them in git. I failed. I see you can get these motherboards on
ebay for $60.

Ideally someone would buy one, take our current sis driver, and make
some rational
patches to add hw support for the new chips.

Dave.