VIA Collaborates with OpenChrome on Open Source Video Driver

[btarunr]

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the next step in its ongoing cooperation with the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

Building on the recent release of the VIA graphics driver available on the VIA Linux Portal, VIA is actively collaborating with the OpenChrome development team on their Open Source graphics driver – initially assisting with multi-head support and RandR function.

Harald Welte, recently contracted by VIA to help refine VIA's Open Source strategy and to optimize its support for Linux across all the components of its x86 processor platforms, has been working closely with both VIA and the FOSS community to enhance the quality and public availability of VIA documentation for developers. Graphics programming manuals for both the VIA CX700M and VX800 chipsets are now available on X.Org and the VIA framebuffer driver source has been checked in to the 2.6.28 mainline kernel.

"This cooperation between the community-based OpenChrome developers and VIA's staff developers will enable everyone to shift towards one code base, combining the features and strengths of both drivers," said Mr. Welte. "It also shows that VIA is not only releasing source code and documentation, but actively moving towards a much more open and collaborative driver R&D process."

"This is a welcome and significant step forward from VIA; the availability of free platform documentation is an essential component for greater open source community developer involvement, to everyone's benefit," said Xavier Bachelot, a developer with the OpenChrome project. "We expect that pooling our development resources and working in a public repository on a consolidated codebase in this way will result in a more feature-complete driver, and a simpler and enhanced experience for the users."

About OpenChrome

The OpenChrome project is committed to providing and supporting fully free and Open Source drivers that take full advantage of the hardware acceleration of VIA chipsets featuring the VIA UniChrome, UniChrome Pro and Chrome9 integrated graphics processors.

Source code, releases and documentation may be found here.

Source: VIA