Funding Radeon driver development

[Daniel Kasak]

Russell Shaw wrote:
> Daniel Kasak wrote:
>> Firstly, I thought I'd start a new thread instead of replying the the 
>> original one, as I'd like to get maximum exposure and not just people 
>> interested in tv-out ...
>>
>> Hanno Böck wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> One of the most missing features for me in linux is my non-working 
>>> tv-out. (well, it can work with the proprietary ati-driver, but 
>>> that's not really what I want)
>>>
>>> Now, I heared that some people were working on that, but never saw a 
>>> patch that made it work for me. As this would make things much 
>>> easier for me, I thought that I might donate a small amount of money 
>>> if someone is willing to pick that issue up. I also think that I 
>>> could gain some more donaters via a public announcement in my blog.
>>>
>>> My question: Would such an initiative be welcome by the xorg-devs? 
>>> Anyone probably already interested in getting such a bounty?
>>
>>
>> I've been meaning to suggest something similar, but I've been snowed 
>> under in work and stuff. I think the bounty idea is a great way of 
>> motivating both users and developers...
>
> Geez, i've had *months* of free time to write drivers for *free* and have
> tried just that for the ATI 9200 card i have.
>
> The failure of xorg is to document anything about writing a card driver,
> how existing ones work, and how DRI works.
>
> Even though i've worked out a lot of it by looking at source code over
> years, there's too much undocumented stuff such as the dozens of card-
> specific non-vga registers and configuration code that makes it
> impossible to understand the hardware well enough to write and debug
> X driver code.
>
> The first thing that could be done is to document what driver code
> is based on proprietory NDA data, and what was reverse engineered.
>
> Money spent on X driver documentation or howtos is far less wasteful
> than X conferences (of which i'll never go to anyway).
>
> If i had've had enough information to hack my radeon card, the ati driver
> could've been by now *bug free*.

Fair enough. What can I say? Again, as and end user, not much. Maybe it 
would be worthwhile to add bounties for documenting stuff? Certainly I 
can't help to document things myself at this point, but if I ever get 
into Xorg development, rest assured that I will at least document the 
stuff that I understand. I'm a Perl / PHP / VB developer, and I 
*heavily* document things. I haven't quite made the jump to C yet ( a 
couple of failed attempts, largely due to lack of free time // excess of 
other projects ).

Dan