Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)

[Mike A. Harris]

Alan Cox wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 02:34:57PM +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
>>Fedora installation out of the box will run binary-only code supplied by
>>your board manufacturer, without really giving you much clue that it's
>>doing so.
> 
> 
> Correct. Each intel board has board specific analogue circuitry and interfaces
> which are driven via a BIOS interface. X would need a driver for each
> motherboard (and potentially each board rev) to do anything else

Yes, the driver may need to become more complicated in order to do
direct mode programming, however users of other proprietary OSs
do have video drivers that give them what they want/need, so it is
possible in theory to have OSS drivers that do the same.  There's
no reason it needs to be multiple separate drivers however, conditional
codepaths and autodetection within a single driver should be able to
handle it, at least in theory.

All smoke until Intel does something that allows the situation to
change though.

-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.