SkyOS Forum

Hi, congratulations for this os.. it looks like very interesting.. i've only a question about the nvidia/ati drivers.
These drivers are closed sources and the manufactures don't release details about the internal hardware, so how is it possible that you have these kind of drivers inside skyos if it has not posix compliance?
These drivers exist only (in binary) for win32 and *nix systems!
Am i in wrong?

Bye
Federico

Yes you are. There are opensource drivers for *nix systems for ati and nVidia cards. There are even open source 3D drivers for ATI and nVidia cards (though neither are comparable to their binary only counterparts, with nVidia's open source drivers noticably inferior to ATIs).

But, in the end, Robert need not borrow from any open source drivers since the 2D specs for ATI and nVidia cards are available to people who join those companies developers programs (and, most likely, sign very strict NDAs).

Adam

Wow, thanks for the fast reply ...
I haven't heard nothing about open source ati/nvidia drivers...
Can you give me the link of these drivers?
Thanks in advance...

Bye
Federico

The open source drivers ATI drivers are merged into the Mesa source tree (http://www.mesa3d.org) and work on FreeBSD and Linux (maybe NetBSD?). r200 and below hardware is much better supported than r300 and newer cards, but their are r300+ drivers. The r200 drivers were written with specifications (for much of the cards features) from ATI. The r300+ drivers have been reverse engineered.

The open source nVidia drivers are based on the old utah-glx code, but have been ported to BeOS (http://www.bebits.com/app/4129). They only support cards up to the GeForce 4MX. The driver is very limited and only supports a small subset of features of the cards.

Adam

Thanks.. i will give a look..

Bye
Federico