01 September 2008, 10:31

VIA open source Xorg display driver released

VIA has released an open source 2D Xorg driver for a number of its graphics chipsets. VIA has been working with Harald Welte to reform its previous open source efforts and the release of the driver follows the publication of various documentation to its chipsets.

The 2D Xorg driver has no support for the 3D hardware video codecs or TV encoding functions available with VIA's chips. In his blog, Harald Welte explained that the driver was not new, but the open source disclosure of an existing driver. While not being specific about the missing 3D and video functionality, Welte pointed to code under a proprietary licence or NDA being the cause of omitted source code in a driver release.

Welte also noted that VIA is not planning at this time to build a community around the new driver at this time. The expectation is that the existing Xorg community could adopt the VIA code into the mainline driver releases. VIA is doing this rather than create new mailing lists that Welte says could fragment the existing community. The driver source code is available on VIA's Linux Portal and can also be directly downloaded.

(djwm)

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