XO Gen 1.5

[Peter Robinson]

> John Watlington wrote:
>> The enabling chipset is hot off the fab line, the VX855 [2].  This
>> single chip provides ... a 3D graphics engine, an HD
>> video decoder
>
> It's worth remembering that the only existing driver that supports either
> of these features is a pure binary blob.  The Openchrome drivers have no
> 3D support, never mind video decode support.  Even their Xv support is
> glitchy.
>
> In other words, this GPU represents a regression, compared to the Geode
> LX, unless you're willing to run with (famously unreliable, unsupported)
> binary-only drivers.
>
> So don't get too excited.

But this should improve with VIA now having employed Harald Welte of
gnuviolations.org fame to help them move forward in the open source
world. They have released their drivers and some manuals for their
GPUs now. So no 3D just yet, but then that's not exactly a regression
compared to the geeode video either. Details of Harald's VIA related
OSS releases can be seen at the link below including links to various
HW programming manuals.

Peter

http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/linux/via/index.html