AMD64 Xorg Help Needed

Shaun Jackman sjackman at gmail.com
Thu Sep 16 17:00:45 PDT 2004


> I would very much like to see the mtx driver opened and included in Xorg as
> much as possible - perhaps similar to the hallib split for mga - particularly
> since the mtx driver is 2D-only.  Even better would be unifying our mga
> driver to support >= G650 as well.  Has anyone talked to Matrox about this?
> Are there even any Matrox people on this list?

The place to contact Matrox people is their web-based forum:
http://forum.matrox.com/mga/viewforum.php?f=2

The moderator on the Linux forum, Ben, is generally quite responsive.
Be prepared to hear a whole lot of nothing if you ask anything about
open source though.

Here's a ranting post on the topic of open source support from
runderwo. The original subject was "TV out with a G550".

Cheers,
Shaun


We are doing this with the X.org driver. Matrox doesn't care about
helping us even with documentation on the maven chip, so don't bother
asking them. The documentation we have has been reverse engineered and
probably will never be complete. It is enough for matroxfb to get
things mostly working, so that's the level of support that the X
driver will have for TV-out and DVI on the second head once the work
is complete -- mostly working.
 
 If Matrox weren't so damn uncooperative, they could avoid time
wasting answering questions about features which should obviously be
supported, but are not, due to their insistence on keeping secrets
about their G-series hardware whose design is now over five years old.
We want information on the maven chip family (MGA-TVO-*) to complete
the dualhead support for the entire range of cards, and on the WARP
processors so we can improve performance and security architecture of
the driver+microcode. But as long as they don't give us the
information we want, Ben will have his time wasted while people ask if
they can do things with their matrox card which every other dualhead
card on the market is capable of doing, and his employers will pay for
this wasted time when people like me could be improving the driver and
satisfying these people's needs at no cost to matrox.
 
I know, I know... "Contact developer relations". Do I sound jaded? The
idea that such behavior towards independent developers gains matrox
some kind of competitive advantage is laughable. If you won't
reasonably support developers and users who have standardized on your
last generation hardware, why should we bother with the next?



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