[Xorg-driver-geode] current status for the GEODE X.ORG driver and future plans

[Martin-Éric Racine]

Greetings,

Here's an update on the current status and on future plans of the
GEODE X.ORG driver:

With the recent release of version 2.11.0 of the X.org driver for the
Geode GX2/LX, a whole cycle was wrapped up for many of the developers
involved:

* Jordan Crouse was among the unlucky ones who recently lost their job
at AMD. The same layoff also affected Coreboot developer Marc Jones
and many other Geode specialists.
* Several members of the OLPC project are also moving on, now that
most Linux kernel and X.org patches have been merged upstream.
* People like myself who were working in the thin client industry on
Geode-based products are also moving on.

As such, remaining bugs and our milestone goal to merge back support
for older GX1 Geodes might never be taken care of.

From this perspective, we welcome active participation of new
developers with access to a wide variety of Geode hardware
(GX1/SC/GX2/LX) to contribute and, eventually, take over upstream
maintenance of xf86-video-geode.

Meanwhile, Jordan, myself and several former OLPC developers still
have access to an XO-1 each and, in my case, to an SC2000-based
product and a couple of different LX800-based products to develop the
driver.  However, given none of us work for a player in the Geode
industry anymore, the incentive to produce new code is obviously low.
Thus, it really is up to the community to contribute as much as it
can, in terms of patches to fix existing bugs and to merge back GX1/SC
support into the driver. For now, we expect these contributions to
take the form of patches against the GIT repository, sent to this
mailing list as Singed-Off attachments. Once we're satisfied with the
quality of the patches we receive, we might selectively grant commit
rights to selected developers.

Best Regards,
Martin-Éric