VIA Keeps Trying For Kernel Inclusion Of Its DRM

[Eosie]

1) They will not make an open source 3D driver probably because they won't be able to implement their patented technologies in it.
2) They are damaging the open source graphics ecosystem by not allowing us to use their patents that everybody else already has.

My two cents.

[Adarion]

Originally Posted by val-gaav

and well VIA has a "great" reputation among linux community so I'm sure VIA users are almost extinct here anyway.

Hey. Wait. I got even 2 VIA boxes. (And some chips here and there) A laptop with a C3-2 and a mini-ITX C7 based. Esp. latter is very good for an x86 in power consumption and the laptop runs 97% with free drivers (I think there might be a binary blob in the softmodem driver part somewhere).
The HW is cheap and isn't good for numbercrunching but that's not what I do with these boxes. Just the GPU/video issues (I'm grateful to the openchrome people but still it sucks) and a few bugs sometimes are nasty.
I'd rather like to see Harald Welte finally kick them to release some specs, cause from all I know the code they "sometimes" release is not of good quality *cough*.

[val-gaav]

Here is the graph from 2008 phoronix survey


I'm sorry but "almost extinct" seems to be good word for this situation... Not that I expect Windows graphs to be much better then this one.

[Adarion]

Originally Posted by val-gaav

Here is the graph

Of course. Compared to AMD-ATI, nv and intel it's not much but still the largest among the small. I admit that I have quite a high concentration of VIA's among my AMDs (and intel CPU, nv GPU) but that's due to the fact that once I needed a notebook and it was the cheapest in the world (Elitegroup ECS G320) and that I was very interested in low power systems at all times - and since Transmeta is no more - I got hooked up to some VIA CPUs for I am still mainly working in the x86 area.
Hoping to receive my fist ARM (besides the router) soon.


Of course the mass market will have a high share of the 3 main GPU manufracturers but then a survery with about 10'000 people still doesn't tell you everything. It really depends on whom you reach. IT sites will barely receive traffic from people with an IE user agent but then websites about cooking or whatever might see a lot of IE users, too.
And there are still a lot of Linux/BSD users not being aware or not actively following Phoronix.
Still the trend is that not much people will have a VIA GPU for the reason that VIA does not sell these as dedicated cards. (And even if they did not much people would buy it I guess.)