OpenChrome: There's Apparently Not Much Left

Written by Michael Larabel in Hardware on 21 May 2014 at 08:58 PM EDT. 21 Comments
HARDWARE
While open-source activities around Intel, AMD Radeon, and NVIDIA (Nouveau) hardware continues to flourish, for the unlucky users still dependent upon VIA x86 hardware, the OpenChrome and VIA kernel mode-setting initiatives seem to have come to a standstill.

I was curious about the state of OpenChrome, since it's been several months since hearing any VIA kernel mode-setting update for the independent VIA DRM/KMS driver that was in the works for several years by James Simmons. Sadly though, there doesn't seem to be anything new and the OpenChrome project seems to be in a dire state.

- There's been no xf86-video-openchrome DDX commits since last October.

- The openchrome-devel list has been barely active this year.

- The most promising open-source VIA x86 work in recent times was around Simmons' OpenChrome DRM driver that for a while looked like it was almost ready for integration into the mainline kernel wasn't touched since last December within the drm-openchrome repository.

- I reached out to Simmons earlier this week but have yet to hear back from him whether he's still pursuing work on this DRM driver or not.

- OpenChrome.org that was once the project site for this driver has now apparently turned into a travel blog.

If I happen to hear anything more about the state of OpenChrome or the VIA open-source community, I'll be sure to update.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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