Re: why not DirectFB?

[Sascha Erni, .rb]

Hi Chad,

Chad Hardin wrote:
> I'm still gonna plug away with DirectFB, but it's lack of heavy support 
> for ATI and nVidia, the major players, discourages me a bit.  That's not 
> their fault though.

I get to talk with most hardware vendors in my function as liaison at 
3dcenter.org. The big players, ATI and NV, are still sort of hesitant to 
fully commit to X alternatives. NVIDIA has their plans, but stable XFree 
/ X.org driver support is of the higher priority for them right now. 
They haven't decided yet whether they want to concentrate on Freedesktop 
or DirectFB, but keep their eyes peeled for what's going on in the 
community. Looks like DirectFB right now. NV's pretty committed to 
Linux, and just got another couple of OpenGL devs on board for driver 
development, so that's something.

ATI hinted at DirectFB support and even directly (ahaha) supporting the 
dev team, but it's not an official statement so please treat this as a 
rumour. I've heard it from more than one bloke by now, so that's where 
I'd place my money. It seems as if that's the road they want to 
go--after getting their X drivers up to scratch.

In any case, none of the IHV will support X alternatives in the too near 
future. They don't feel like overly stretching their tight driver 
development resources, but they've realised that Linux isn't simply a 
"hobby" for bored Windows users any longer. ;) I'm conducting a series 
of interviews with ATI right now, and I'll try to get a statement out of 
Chris Hook et al. regarding X alternatives. As soon as I know more, so 
will you.

93,
-Sascha.rb
--
Sascha "nggalai" Erni, .rb
www.dudagroup.com
www.3dcenter.org
www.nggalai.com