GPU driver/doc development

[Mikko J Rauhala]

On ma, 2007-09-10 at 12:08 +0100, Jim McDonald wrote:
> Not wishing to be contrary for its own sake, but my answer to your 
> (supposedly rhetorical) question would be 'the docs'.  If we had a 
> complete manual then that would be enough for other people to write the 
> driver, whereas if we have a driver and no docs then it's going to be 
> next to impossible for the community to add features or fix bugs in said 
> driver and we're stuck with whatever functionality your incredibly small 
> team finds time to implement.

You're not being very realistic here. "Complete manual" would presumably
take a lot of time in itself (what with the "incredibly small team" and
all), all the while us having no drivers. Publishing the GTA-02 without
much in the way of GPU drivers at all would then delay development of
applications that take advantage of said GPU. If they can hack even
rudimentary drivers for the GTA-02 release, on the other hand (something
only they can do before that anyway), application development can then
proceed smoothly from the get-go.

'course, there is a cutoff point where devoting more effort to
documentation makes sense, and I am glad it is in the pipeline for the
reasons you mention. That point is probably somewhere around where a
basic GPU driver is working, and it's time to add more advanced features
and tune performance.

The definition of "basic" here is, of course, loose. I'd pencil it
somewhere around where rotation, video acceleration and perchance some
basic 3d rendering is going on, but I don't mean that to be a solid
definition, rather leaving that up to the people who do the work.

-- 
Mikko J Rauhala <mjrauhal at cc.helsinki.fi>
University of Helsinki