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Creative to build Linux 3D drivers 131

Posted by Hemos from the must-have-better-sound-support dept.
James Hall writes "Jon Taylor recently posted a message to the linux-ggi list indicating that he is going to be working for Creative Labs to build both Linux sound drivers for the Live cards as well as drivers (binary only) for all the graphics cards Creative makes (including cards based around 3DFX, nVidia, 3DLabs, and Rendition chipsets). The message has been circulating around (I found it on the opengl-gamedev-l mailing list) but the original can be found here. "
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Creative to build Linux 3D drivers More

Creative to build Linux 3D drivers

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  • Why would the specs for how to get the bit stream from the DVD player to the decoder card be under NDA from the DVD consortium (or whoever)? They didn't build the decoder chip, nor the board it is on. The decryption should be in the chip, so it's not as if we would get the specs for that anyway.
  • This doesn't really apply much to the SB Live!, since Creative makes the chipset, but for their proposed video drivers, this is important. How much do you want to bet that their drivers will only work with their boards? The last thing Linux needs is x different closed source drivers for Y chipset for boards from different vendors, all that could be harboring their own bugs. We need to be convincing 3Dfx, nVidia, and 3DLabs to release specs, not the board maufacturers that use their chipsets.
  • I think he'll probably be easily coerced to provide compiled Mesa GLide-like "plugins" for FreeBSD, which would be a wonderful thing!

  • It is all very nice to have GGI drivers, but Linus has stated that they will never be included in the standard kernel.

    What about X drivers so the rest of us can use them? (these would also be portable to other free unices)

  • I'll settle for a binary only driver for my Encore DXR2 card. As long as I don't have to reboot to windows just to watch a movie, I'm happy.
  • Red Hat won't ship binary-only drivers, and they are 50% of the Linux market. SuSE has no problem with binary-only drivers (they license the non-free OSS as part of SuSE Linux), but their presence in the U.S. is still not very large (though growing). Caldera has no problem with binary drivers but Caldera sells into business markets, not into the kinds of markets that use sound cards or 3D drivers. Slackware? Debian? Forget it!

    In short, I fear that Creative is going to find that having Linux drivers is no good for their sales, since nobody is going to include those drivers with their distributions and many people of the musical persuasion are uncomfortable going somewhere on the Internet to download their drivers. Is the Linux community going to get a black eye over this? You bet! When Creative discontinues Linux support because "Linux people don't use sound cards" (as verified by their FTP download logs, showing negligible downloads of their drivers), it'll make all sorts of other companies currently interested in Linux take a step backwards.

    -- Eric
  • To sell even more hardware to more people? I'm referring to the free-unix community in general here, not just Linux/x86. This includes *BSD as well as Linux. Creative's bottom line is "sell hardware", and if it becomes obvious that substantial increases in sales would occur if they opened driver sources, they might be persuaded to do so (or be pushed out of competition by a company that does).
  • Posted by The Apocalyptic Lawnmower:

    (that's cool in Dutch)

    Hmm too bad it's not open-source, but it's a step in the right direction. It's a good thing companies finally dare to step on the Linux platform. With the rate of companies committing at least somewhat to Linux, I dare to say that we have gained a critical mass. Not that anyone noticed that yet.

    Anyway, as always, only buy hardware that supports you - whether it be just Linux, open source, or all the way - free software. Make vendors know your needs. Marketing droids only understand sales figures.

    - ze Apocalyptic Lawnmower
  • If 3dfx had allowed Daryll Strauss to open source his drivers and had released their hardware specs openly, we would probably have stable working drivers for Voodoo, Voodoo2 and Banshee...

    I hope someone can convince Creative and the other hardware companies to release the specs to thier hardware... They make money selling hardware, not selling drivers...
  • That's all well and good. Now where are the Matrox G200 3D drivers? :)
  • Still, this is a step in the right direction. Even "closed source" drivers for 3D cards will enlarge the Linux game market, which will increase sales of 3D video cards, which will provide further incentive to open the source of said drivers.

    TedC

    "Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward? That's the trouble with time travel, you never can tell." -- Doctor Who

    Androids of Tara?

  • Woops, that was me. Sorry about that. Be nice if Slashdot forced a preview and handled invalid usernames/passwords a bit more gracefully....



  • I agree 100% ... I won't be buing any creative product for which there isn't a 100% free driver ... maybe I wills kip their products entierly ... which has been my policy to date ... so nothing will change ... same with 3D under linux ...
  • classic FUD ... same could be said about just about anything ....

    imagine you buy a car ... the car company doesn't tell you how to drive it ... you have to use THEIR driver .... you can't hire a different driver ... and you can't drive it yourself ... that's what happens ....

    what they should give out is the interface ... NOT the implementation ... the product is the hardware ... not the software ... not to mention that your understanding of patent laws is not that good ... if they have something patented ... they can make it completely public ... no-one can copy it .... plus if you already made something public ... no one can patent it ...

    creative should make all the INTERFACES to their hardware public ... and provide sample drivers and smale source code ...

    if I were to argument like you ... "CPU companies should keep their instruction sets secret and only provide you with a compiler ..." ... I mean they don't want a bunch of broken compilers ... and they don't want others to discover how their cpu works .... and car companies should not allow you to drive your car by yourself ... you probably aren't as good of a driver ...

    your logic is extremely flawed

  • Support from companies like Creative (especially Creative) will go a long way toward helping drag the game industry to our Operating System of Choice.
  • I hope they do it soon, one of the only reasons I still have to deal with windows is all of my sound apps. The Live is actually quite an excellent sound card for $200 and I look forward to the day when hard disk recording and sound design programs start to appear for Linux, They can definitely benefit from its inherent stability.
  • I just wanna see all boxes in computer stores from now on with a little penguin in the corner with a "Designed for Linux", maybe we could rid those designed for windows 95/98 stickers too? :)
  • Accelerated drivers for my Nvidia TNT. Now that will truely rock. I just hope my STB AGP TNT card will be able to use them. If not, I'll just have to make room for my Creative labs PCI one.

    HAPPY HAPPY, JOY JOY :) :) :)
  • Big step in the right direction. Yeah... open would be nice... but we can always revers engineer the stuff for an oss driver if we want one bad enough... this is approaching the much needed time when all drivers are released for linux alongside bigger commercial counterpart OS's. Thats important.
  • Yuck.

    They're better than nothing.

    That's not saying a lot though.

    As a community, it's our role to say, "Thank you for the support" - but not leave it at that. Long term, we want open source.

    Linux plays by different rules than Windows. Hardware vendors will eventually need to realize this, or lose market share and profits.

    I hope the community never comes to accept binary-only drivers. At least we can be sure that Debian never will.

    Cheers,

    - Jim

  • :O (Score:1)

    by Guy Harris ( 3803 )
    where? do they have a www page?

    Yes, at http://www.cnetusa.com [cnetusa.com].

  • Yeah, that's right. Just keep pissing on people's work while calling them jerks.

    BTW, would you care to sign your name to that?
    --
  • You may like to program, but trust me, you really don't want to program driver level code unless you have to. If you did, you'd have a program that only supported *one* sound card, and would require significant reworking to support any other sound card. Linux is (imho) all about portability, which means programming to a well defined API, or library. In most cases that means programming to the OSS or ALSA api, or some wrapper thereof. You think "oh, having the specs would be so great."? Study the specs for hardware out there that you *can* get the docs for. Be it hard drives, parallel ports, whatever. See if that's *really* where you want to spend your time programming. If so, contact companies out there that are in need of Linux drivers, and offer to help them support Linux. The worst that will happen is they'll say no.

    Personally, I'm more than happy to leave the driver level stuff to the people who make the card. I long for the day I can buy a hot new video card, install the custom accelerated X server (or module) off of the CD, and be up and running. Same for a sound card. I personally prefer to play with my system as a whole, and not have to worry about compiling or hand reviewing everything that's on it. I'd never have time for Quake if I did. =)

    Now if that's your thing, more power to you. There was a time when I was a bit twiddler, poking values to io ports, and polling for status returns. But, most people have no need for the intimate details of hardware specs. It's not something that *has* to be out there. More importantly, if driver level programming is your thing, get out where you can exercise it.
  • "Safeguarding" that information by hiding the interface specs is pointless, because it's only a matter of time before the binaries are disassembled or even decompiled. There hasn't been much happening on that front in the past because we've had sources for everything, but if binary drivers become commonplace then you can bet your last dollar that we'll have top-notch tools to do the required work for us soon.

    There are at least three very solid reasons why this will (and must) happen:

    1. The kernel is not a protected space and this makes it extremely sensitive to programming faults (driver experts are not necessarily total kernel experts, and most are human too). Faults need to be fixed rapidly, and corporate teams cannot always do that because the resource may be committed to another project. Furthermore, if the fault is actually a design fault then corporates may not be keen to acknowledge that they've made a large balls'up, and sometimes don't even acknowledge that there *is* a fault if it's not a showstopper. That is not adequate.

    2. The lack of access protection in the kernel makes it a security risk to have unreviewed code there. It is really easy to pop a cracker-infected module into the kernel and unwittingly compromise the operating system's security in just about any way the cracker likes. This is so scary that this reason alone is enough to make binary drivers complete anathema for many.

    3. You buy powerful I/O hardware to offload some of the CPU's work onto it, not for the manufacturer to offload some of his hardware processing onto your CPU. If your CPU seems to be spending too many cycles in the driver, the first port of call is to see what the driver is doing.

    These are powerful reasons. Manufacturers like Creative don't seem to understand these driving forces at all at present, but in time they will. They will have no option, because fighting the way that the community does things will be commercial suicide in a market that they are trying to attract, not disaffect.

  • Yeehaw! (Score:1)

    by Quinn ( 4474 )
    Recently I've been contemplating sound and video cards to replace the stuff that came on-board my new AMD system at home, and this certainly helps with my decision. Great news.
  • Zanshin at www.planetquake.com/gldojo

    if you care,

    took Creative to task for their disastrous NT drivers for Live, and supposed support for that platform. Aside from that,their SB 16 NT drivers as of this last summer were _STILL_ full of bugs! For an integrated chip on a dual processor Tyan board (my experience), you'd think they might get the F***ing drivers up to snuff for NT. Winamp-> 2 seconds -> Blue Screen.

    It was that freakin bad.

    Zanshin gutted their driver for Live and told them all the stupid mistakes they were making. Nice case of closed source drivers being handed out to good programmers and causing total frustration.

    Whatever CL pulls off with cool hardware or graphics fanciness, they'll never get my biz.
    I hope this new Linux stud does a good job, at least he's already closer to the customer base.

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by Extremist ( 4666 )
    [picking jaw up off the floor] Now THAT is a company that will get my money if I need the hardware. As long as the hardware is good, mind you. I hate buying from closed source (closed minded) companies, but I hate crappy hardware just as much. So, where can I find these people? I happen to be in need of an inexpensive NIC, and this one just shot to the top of my list.
  • Don't get too excited by this! If the current lack of 3D hardware support brings too many Linux users into accepting binary-only drivers, this could set a dangerous precedent for other hardware manufactors.
  • Ik heb nog nooit zo'n kutuitdrukking gehoord ...
    translates to: "All losers suck"

  • The biggest obstacle to Linux on the desktop is the vast waste of memory and other processor time of X.

    While X certainly uses a fair amount of memory, ps indicates it's only used 1.5% of CPU time for me at the moment. I don't consider that "vast".

    X offers very little functionality for a desktop system,

    Please explain. What functionality does a desktop system need that can't be implemented as an application using X?

    and the networking stuff is inefficient.

    Another unsupported statement.

    The solution: XFree should focus on making a smaller and more usable package, and leave the direct graphics stuff up to GGI.

    Or: Implement only GGI/KGIcon drivers (which should be highly portable as well), and run X via Xggi.

    You'll have to come up with a pretty damned good reason to explain exactly how adding an extra layer is going to reduce the "inefficiency" you criticise.

  • We have fully open, with GPLed drivers, LML33 video capture card with hardware JPEG codec [linuxmedialabs.com].

    You're welcome to look at and if you want to support the notion of open hardware and want to
    have fun messing with registers and bits - order the darn board.

  • Sorry, but device drivers and other operating system components *must* be open source before I will run it or buy hardware associated with it. I've been using open source for far too long to go back to proprietary crud. Don't think binary-only drivers are that big a deal? Talk to someone with OSS-commercial and ask them how easy it is to change kernels. I don't honestly care about commercial *applications*, as I can live with or without them.

    I realize that probably alot of the reason that things are kept closed are because of NDAs Creative and other companies have with 3dfx and such, and I understand. But you should also understand that my understanding still won't motivate me to throw money at you for your products.

    If this were something similar to the Neomagic Xfree86 driver development, where it was almost expected that the driver would be opened later when Neomagic realized it wouldn't hurt them, I'd probably be more optimistic. However, this is quite a different situation, and even this developer admits it. Most of this code is *never* going to see the light of day. Does this guy think he really is *that* much of an uber-coder that he can write all of those drivers *on his own*, without missing something? I don't feel like seeing exploit code for a proprietary sound driver on bugtraq one day, thanks. I'll go without a 3d accelerator and even other basic hardware until the entire industry takes its collective head out of its collective arse.
  • Anyone here have any experiences with ATI video cards? I use the Mach 64 Rage Pro (8MB) card in my Red Hat Linux Box and it seems to work well.
    I would be interested if anyone has had experience with them from a server or workstation perspective.

    Thanks
  • Hmmm...what would be a good card for a Linux Workstation (preferably 1280x1024 and above) ;-)

    Nick
    LSG
  • Framerate? Please compare with windows on the same machine too, for reference.
  • I guess I'm not the only one to realize that 90% of email like he sent gets flushed to /dev/null. If people really want to make a difference they need to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and WRITE the companies!! You wouldn't believe how much more effect that has. email is too easy and NEVER gets seen by anyone that makes decisions in a company as large as Creative.
  • Aww, nuts. Even though I originally wanted to get a Creative TNT, but they weren't available in Canada when I was building my machine, so I went with the STB board. Now I have another reason to kick myself!
  • Exactly. BeOS is proprietary, so what? I don't need an OS to be Open Source, just functioning. BeOS is the sweetest OS out there, too bad the hardware support is minimal. I will be definetly switch to Be when it supports my hardware (Leadtek 2300, SBLive). Be is trying to change radically its UI instead of taking the route Windows and Linux did: steal from Apple (which in turn stole from PARC)
  • I used to work for Creative tech support here in Stillwater, Oklahoma. E-mail support was not handled at all. If they added it, it is something new, and I bet they are not giving much priority to it.

    Actually, faxing them is probably one of the best ways to go. Someone will actually take the time to try to work through your problem, unlike the people who are on the phone and are supposed to try to keep the call to a 12 minute average.
  • I am planning to buy a TNT based video card soon. I have been contemplating which one to buy, but seeing this news makes the choice a whole lot easier.

    Creative is moving in the right direction, I hope they reconsider and open-source the drivers... although I guess they don't want release Linux drivers for their cards and thus support every manufacturer's other card that uses the same chipset. Their work/time/money would be benifit other companies as much as it would their own. I can sympathize.

    Really what should happen is the chip makers release generic drivers for the chipsets. Overall this is good though. In the long run it won't really be an issue though, eventually every chip maker/manufacturer will be forced to make Linux drivers due to demand (it'll happen). Those who don't will be at a weakness as Linux support is viewed more and more important.
  • I would like to see those "creative" people release a driver for the SB Pro, or does anyone know where to get one?? My 486 bomb doesnt have a sb driver yet :(

    ICQ:15037019
    Email:15037019@pager.mirabilis.com
  • It's not actually completely true that RedHat won't include binary-only. They include XBFCom NeoMagic X servers, which are only binary. I don't know if this means that they'll use the Creative drivers, though, because it is generally true that they refuse.
  • It'd be awfully nice if they were to release specs or a Linux driver for their DVD drive. I'd like to be able to set up a Linux based DVD player.
  • What trade secrects could possibly be in 3D drivers? The only way that I could see that would be:

    -The 3D stuff is done in software.
    -Building 3D boards is ridiculously easy and making drivers is the hard part.

    Of course, if the first one is the case, doesn't this defeat the purpose of hardware acceleration?
    If the second one is the case, then the real difference between the voodoo I and the voodoo II is the driver?

    Shouldn't the interface to 3D hardware be similar to the programmer's interface to openGL? I.e. here's a polygon. Here's the textures. Here's the viewport. Draw it. What could possibly be so secret about that. Can someone please answer this, it's been bugging me for a while.
  • OK, now it's *cool* to support Linux, but what about FreeBSD, or BeOS, or some little operating system I want to crank up in my spare time? Hardware device interface specifications should be freely available.
  • What if Intel decided to keep their instruction set secret, so that AMD and Cyrix couldn't make clones? You'd have to sign an NDA to write a compiler. Don't you think that would be entirely counterproductive for the computer industry? This is exactly the same thing. Nobody should stand for hardware that doesn't come with instructions on how to use it, or at least have them available.
  • 1) If anyone wants to know *that* badly, the drivers are small enough to realiably decompile. Or you could just examine the patents the company holds.

    2) There will be one driver included in standard dists that works 100% in all hardware combinations. As opposed to the one that works at 95% optimal.

    One point - in the article he said some parts would be kept secret due to alorithms creative wants to protect. Does this mean he would roughly label what they do and so people can write a (perhaps less efficient) free version?
  • Hooaahh!

    That's the single most intelligent thing I've heard in the war against "lock and key hardware".

    I think it's time manufacturers started listening to those of us who buy the hardware. If I spend money on a high-end card, I want it to be ready to run on whichever Linux I choose :) Yeah, right out of the box too! Foo on companies (who shall remain nameless) that strongarm the little guy. God bless Linus.
  • I'm thinking that I'd rather pay $40 to OSS for a Creative sound driver, and donate $50 to XFree86 for a graphics driver for a Voodoo card. Both organizations have provided the framework for the implementation of other vendors' hardware drivers.

    For myself, it will definitely affect a future buy decision if I can look at for example, Gateway or Dell's component list for a system, and determine either directly or by going to the component vendors' web pages, that drivers are available for Linux. It would affect my decision even more directly if the computer vendor provided drivers on their "System Restoration" CD.
  • I just got a sudden urge to start reverse engineering a DVD driver... And luckily for me I live in a country where reverse engineering drivers to be able to interoperate with a product is a right that's protected by law... Hm :-)
  • Read the post he made to the GGI mailing list: He talks about a KGI driver, which would presumably let you run all GGI programs, all SVGALib programs (through SVGALib API for GGI - don't know what the status of that is currently, though), and X (through KGICON and the fbdev in Linux 2.2).

    In addition he mentioned OpenGL support

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