VIA's Linux Dreams Are Not Materializing

[Chad Page]

Hopefully *good* news.

VIA has a long history of shooting themselves in the foot in many ways. i.e. downgrading from Sanyo to GCS capacitors from Epia->Epia-M, giving the latter a near-100% failure rate. Then keeping the prices so high (>$100) that intel was able to stroll in and grab their market with mini-ITX Atoms (~$80)

[t.s.]

VIA has responded to Phoronix... Stay tuned for an article tomorrow. The situation is even more interesting now with another twist to the story.

Now you made us curious, Micheal (or just me ?) More opensource news from CPU side are always welcomed..
But, I think it's just another episode of 'selling dreams', heh..
And yes, like @Chad said, they shoot themselves in the foot: If you give me a choice, wether Intel or VIA, I absolutely choose the first (CHEAPER, and WIDER support).

[doctoren]

I was actually browsing the forums the other day for any VIA news. I own 3 VIA boards all bought years ago. I was hugely surprised at the time that the Linux support was/is so poor. As others have pointed out this is really an area were they need to excel. I'm pretty happy with the VIA boards but I gave up on any decent desktop performance long ago. It will be interesting to hear what VIA has to say this time.

[Adarion]

Ha. Ha. This is so surprising.

Well, as I did before I will not buy or recommend ANY VIA hardware unless I see my oooooooold CLE266 fly. Not even EXA works. It's better than VESA but just that. Can't even accelerate the fbcon.

It would be nice since their HW doesn't use much power and they have that fancy padlock, but then they are going to lose this special corner of them sooner or later.

Nah, I'll better stay with AMD-ATI. Just got my first accelerated desktop cube recently due to the latest Mesa and kernel stuff. And I have a working fglrx as second option.

[Michael]

VIA's Linux Strategy Takes A Turn With Hidden Driver


"Yesterday we reported on VIA's Linux dreams not materializing with their GEM/TTM memory management support still missing even though we are half-way into 2010 -- more than two years after VIA announced its most recent open-source initiative. It turns out, however, for what VIA views as its memory management work is actually done. VIA has inconspicuously handed over some of its code to the OpenChrome developers in order to create a new driver that has been dubbed the "openvia" driver. VIA has supposedly provided the source-code to an X driver plus TTM/GEM DRM, but this new project largely remains a hidden mystery."

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14963

[Chad Page]

Newegg actually has a MicroATX C7 board with a PCI-e x16 slot for $60. Sadly no MicroATX's with x16 slots, tho. And there are no VIA Nano products on 'egg *at all*, and the C7 isn't really competitive with a dual-core Atom.

So that's the other issue - new VIA technologies/chips take forever to actually become available.

And then there's the volume issue - intel driver enhancements get seen by the widest # of people, so it's a better use of time to refine them...