1. Open Source Graphic Drivers - They Don't Kill Kittens
(They might piss them off though...)
Dave Airlie
OLS 2006

2. Introduction Who am I? Current Vendor Support Status
Closed Source Drivers – Why?
Bring on the kittens...
Future
Reverse Engineering

3. Current Driver Status - Intel
Current Drivers shipped with X.org
2D Modesetting support
VBE based
I915resolution
3D DRI support
No current HW TNL
No Zone Rendering
Best supported 3D card

4. Current Driver Status - ATI
Ex-shining light of Linux graphics :-)
3 categories
Pre-R300
Community drivers for r200 now feature complete + FASTER than fglrx
R300-R4XX
3D drivers getting closer to feature complete
R5xx and beyond
Fglrx, vesa or waste of money

5. Current Driver Status - NVIDIA
“nv” 2D driver in X.org
Supported – new cards added.
Feature deprived – no dualhead, clone mode.
Written in C<^H>Hex
Nvidia driver from Nvidia
Binary – x86, x86-64 only
Well supported by nvidia
Work with community on new GL features
Still suck

6. Current Driver Status - Others
Matrox
G100, G200, G400, G450, G550 – PCI/AGP/PCIE
All in X.org, newer cards binary driver from Matrox
SiS/VIA – Taiwanese manufacturers
SiS/Trident – Thomas Winischofer
2D in X.org for all cards, very well written driver
DRI support on SiS300 series
VIA - Unichrome
2D/3D in X.org for all cards - Fragmented coders

7. Closed Source Drivers - Reasons
Microsoft
Conspiracy theory – DX XBOX
????
Patents, legal fears
Profit
Competitive in the high-end
Gaming mostly – why non-gaming cards closed?
Why do SLI/Crossfire – more users want Linux opensource drivers

8. Closed Source Drivers - Fluffy
Open Source OS
Auditable code paths
Highly stable
Freedom
Loading a 1MB binary blob
YOU ARE NO
LONGER RUNNING
AN OPEN SOURCE OS

9. Mittens Leeching Open source community provides Stable kernel
X.org infrastructure and future ideas
Acceleration architecture
Memory management systems
Contributing back some things might help

10. Kitty Niche + embedded systems Closed source in an embedded market
Very hard to debug embedded systems with huge chunks of binary code doing nasty things
My experience
Single 3D application systems – miniglx, EGL
PPC, Sparc – non-x86 users

11. Patches Out-of-date systems Card reaches end-of-life
NVIDIA legacy driver
Drops support for lots of cards
But at least they do this.
FGLRX
No r100 support ever (they point to us for support..)
R200 is generally broken

12. Open Source Drivers Future Intel
Most Excellent
Non-VBE 2D modesetting
In progress
Hacky make it work for myself code from me
Eric Anholt from Intel – much better effort :-)
3D drivers
New memory management from Tungsten Graphics
New chipsets with more features
Drivers usually ready with chipset release

13. ATI – Open source community
R300 reverse engineering project
Using fglrx and Windows drivers
Adding more features
Stabilised 9800 support
R5xx + future
Brand new 2D engine
Open source driver code with ATI for 3 months for review
2D support is approx 600 lines of code

14. NVIDIA – Open source efforts
Nouveau Project
5-6 people so far
Reverse engineer nvidia 3D
Also add 2D features
EXA
Dualhead, mergedfb
No triangles yet – lots of RE work

15. Reverse Engineering - 2D
Personally – Intel 865, 915 and ATI r5xx
Video BIOS
LRMI + vbetool
Use LRMI to trap every in/out port access
Parse into a useful file
Cut chunks out until minimum necessary code is there
Existing driver
Apple drivers – BenH mmap hack
Libsegfault - Radeon 9800 hang problems

16. Reverse Engineering - 3D
3D drivers – 2 parts
In kernel management code
Userspace OpenGL command conversion
Treat userspace as blackbox
Write some OpenGL test applications - Rinse
Watch what is written to the card - Wash
Repeat
Also scary windows dumper
Dumps AGP memory whenever it changes

17. While researching for this..
I did a google image search for kittens, with safesearch disabled,
Top link

18. Conclusion Just an overview of the driver status
Not an open-source zealot
Two things
Make my machines work
Make customers machines do what is needed
Lighthearted
Taking this stuff seriously makes you drink too much
And remember some day..

19. THE KITTENS WILL HAVE REVENGE....