Right now we have agreed with XGI to do the following:

- The 2D part (most of it is already in the linux kernel) is open source. This means you can download a vanilla linux kernel, put an XGI card in your ODW, OSW, HMC or Efika and HAL/OF will initialize the card, openfirmware will be able to use your card and you'll have a 2D linux console and X console.

- The 3D part is currently not open source. That means that if you want state of the art 3D stuff, you'll have to use a binary driver we provide for you. On the longer term there is a possibility that this 3D driver will be open sourced as well, but, unfortunately, I cannot pin a date on that yet. XGI is thinking about all possible scenarios.

If you are a HAL/OF customer, or you want to make a driver for that super-OS you're developing, we can help you by providing documentation, a so-called software programmers guide or a design kit and we can proxy for you with XGI.

What we cannot do is give you the source code for the current driver, to be included as GPL in for instance X.org. The reason is not that we don't want to do that but that were asked not to ( for now ) and we respect XGI wishes in that regard. However, if you think you can improve the XGI driver, we can work something out (maybe an internship where you get to show XGI your skills).

I would love to have your input on how we should organize this (better). If you have ideas, feedback, disagree, agree, please put it in an email and send it to me. I'll discuss good ideas with XGI and who knows what happens.

As ATI or NVIDIA are not providing source code of their latest GPU 3D drivers that's understandable that XGI do the same.

But, in my opinion, the thing which today is not "cool" for us, Linux, MorphOS and not Windows or MacOSX users, is that ATI / NVIDIA do not provide source code of older graphic cards drivers supporting shaders (ex: 9800 for ATI).

So, the thing that could be good for XGI would be to provide such drivers in a few years, or older one if they have older GPU which do not include their latest technology.
In my opinion that would be a way to do something different than ATI/NVIDIA and would surely make them have a biggest influence in open source community and probably more users.


Question a bit out of topic : if Genesi has XGI 3D drivers source code, is it also planned to do a MorphOS version of it ?

As far as I know, nobody is working on this. It would probably make a fun MorphOS project, but I don't have the time to do it. I also don't know how much work this would be from a MorphOS point of view, a MorphOS developer can probably tell you more about their 3D graphics framework and the engineering effort required to port a driver such as the one we have for Linux.

it looks like it would be a good project, there wouldnt be many people losing out of it, but the problem would be finding people who are fairly aware of how MOS handles graphics

The OSW is interesting. I don't see it serve the exact same purpose as the ODW, so an upgrade program would not be my first wish. However I would be very interested in a passive cooled PegasosII solution without advanced cooling (like in the Home Media System).
Are there any chance a passive cooled 7448 CPU card will be made for the Pegasos?

the problem with passive cooling is that it takes alot to remove the heat produced to stop the chips becoming toasted. It is either a good thing or a bad thing that the processor is vertical because for either different methods work, and different methods can either be cheap or hideously expensive or somewhere in between.

What about the method of just running it at a lower clock speed?

a lot of applications, no matter multithreaded or not simply get more performance with higher processor speeds. I saw a rack server design which looked very clever a while back. the cpu cards were at the back of the case and parallel to the sides of the case. the cards were connected to a block of aluminium through heatpipe and the aluminium block was cooled by water

CGX driver development is currently feasible for MOS core developers only since the CGX DDK is not public (it is just not final by now). This may change some future time, but not in the closer future.
For a MOS driver you need to pass the required chip information (and hardware) to the CGX folks.

Yes... That's common sense.
But that's besides the point. Often you dont' need all that speed. People buying fan-less VIA EDEN boards don't buy them for speed. They just need a silent, stable board.

a good feature to have (like in the intel mobile processors) is load balancing, ie ramping up clock speed when needed and when not, keeping it low. but the intel processors insert nops whilst scaling. Hopefully the next gen PPC processors can speed scale without using nops

IBM G5 have this for quite some time already, it is called "PowerTune" and can do miracles to the average power consumption.
Please see the corresponding figures at PPCNUX.

I'm with all of the above. I'm giving the Pegasos-II G4 away to a friend/relative for some minor fee and buying a brand-new OSW.

Hi Trilkk, we closed this poll after a week, but we still appreciate your interest!

R&B :)