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0 pointsmananaysiempre6mo ago0 comments

As far as things I care about go, the HDMI Forum’s overt hostility[1] to open-source drivers is the important part, but it would indeed be interesting to know what Intel cared about there.

(Note that some self-described “open” standards are not royalty-free, only RAND-licensed by somebody’s definiton of “R” and “ND”. And some don’t have their text available free of charge, either, let alone have a development process open to all comers. I believe the only thing the phrase “open standard” reliably implies at this point is that access to the text does not require signing an NDA.

DisplayPort in particular is royalty-free—although of course with patents you can never really know—while legal access to the text is gated[2] behind a VESA membership with dues based on the company revenue—I can’t find the official formula, but Wikipedia claims $5k/yr minimum.)

[1] https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-i...

[2] https://vesa.org/vesa-standards/

0 comments

Solocle6mo ago

See, the openness is one reason I'd lean towards Intel ARC. They literally provide programming manuals for Alchemist, which you could use to implement your own card driver. Far more complete and less whack than dealing with AMD's AtomBIOS.

As someone who has toyed with OS development, including a working NVMe driver, that's not to be underestimated. I mean, it's an absurd idea, graphics is insanely complex. But documentation makes it theoretically possible... a simple framebuffer and 2d acceleration for each screen might be genuinely doable.

https://www.x.org/docs/intel/ACM/

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