Messages

1

Developers / Re: Adding alpha blending to the Openchrome drivers?

« on: January 13, 2008, 10:35:45 pm »

The driver needs to support 3 basic things:

Composite + Render + ARGB GLX buffers

The Orbiter code is written entirely using X.org standard extensions. My understanding is that the VIA chipsets, at least the latest ones, can support full alpha blended overlay. The problem is that #1 VIA doesn't release the specs, except under NDA & #2 there aren't a huge number of developers who have the skills needed to extend the OpenChrome drivers to support OpenGL + Composite in the drivers, especially for free.

My understanding is that not all VIA chips are equal and different "flaws" in the driver vary depend on the model of the MD. I do understand your grief regarding the drivers released by VIA but this is no different from NVidia's position. I think the best thing to do is understand exactly what model of Unichrome Pro is used on the Fiire Station from the devs of the device and see what driver is being used. I would also like to know what the term "licensed" driver means. I know that ddamron has a model. I think that the openchrome drivers are a dead road since they are not actively developed on the newer chips especially regarding 2D/3D acceleration.

We should be in a good position to help integrate these drivers for 710 since that is what they advertise as doing. If there are any problems, we should bug VIA regarding the issues and hope that they solve the issue in their driver. It helps that we use something similar to what Fiire are using since this would allow us to use the same channels that they are using and help each other to end up with less bugs/issues.

2

Developers / Re: Adding alpha blending to the Openchrome drivers?

« on: January 11, 2008, 03:17:28 pm »

This is probably what you are looking for. There is even support for other precompiled stuff for Ubuntu 7.10. I didn't even need any of that crap since I don't use any 3d or mpeg decoding on the thinclients.

Do you know how to package the driver ?

3

Developers / Re: Adding alpha blending to the Openchrome drivers?

« on: January 11, 2008, 02:58:00 pm »

I just gave it a try on a VIA P4M800Pro. There are quite a lot of variants for Unichrome chipsets, but the driver is basically the same. I only needed to add the option to enable the Composite extension in my xorg.conf to get it working.

The output of xdpyinfo shows that the composite extension was indeed loaded. Can someone provide me with a static binary of a utility that uses composite ? Just for a quick test...

I will not be in a position to test LMCE while at work...

But at least, this is promising well

4

Developers / Re: Adding alpha blending to the Openchrome drivers?

« on: January 11, 2008, 02:23:10 pm »

It should surely be possible since the Fiire machines have some support. Now if this is a case of using drivers which can't be redistributed by lmce but can be downloaded separately by the user, then its still doable.

5

Developers / Re: Where the Source Code Lives

« on: January 10, 2008, 04:53:51 pm »

I was just about to do a checkout of the tree to start playing at it ...

Thanks will post on this thread regarding my progress and maybe updating the wiki if things are old

6

Developers / Re: Adding alpha blending to the Openchrome drivers?

« on: January 10, 2008, 04:42:00 pm »

I have experience with working on these drivers for real thinclients as my day job at work. Even managed to get dual head working out of them.

What do you require to get UI2 working ?
3d? DRI? xv?

--
Raphael