Day 2: Bofs: XFree86 4.0

So Dirk ended up giving a short version of the talk he gave at LinuxWorld. You can look my report from LinuxWorld for the details and look at his slides which are in the picture library.
He did mention that after heading back home, he would make another release of XFree86 to include the new drivers that have been written since version 3.3.3.1

After his short presentation, we went started talking about XFree86 (since this was a BOF in the first place). A few points that were mentionned were:

• XFree86 3.9.15 should hopefully be out before LinuxWorld expo (in August). The idea is that it should be mostly complete and good enough for people to start looking at.
• We have had three examples of video cards for which binary drivers were released first, and sources later, when the chip is considered more or less obsolete. Let's hope that in the case of binary only drivers, this trend continues.
• Sun is the first company to release full 3D specs for one video card (Matrox only released near complete specs), but most companies still consider those specs proprietary information. 2D specs do not seem to be a issue anymore (for instance 3DFX didn't mind releasing the 2D specs of their banshee and Voodoo 3 boards while they do not want source code to their glide 3D API to be released since it's where their competitive edge is)
• One idea that was mentionned was to add a page to the XFree86 web site of wanted boards, and people who have them or can find them at swap meets can send them to Dirk, or other members of the XFree86 team. The idea is that XFree86 4.0 will have to drop support for some very old cards just because the members of the XFree86 project haven't been able to locate even one of those cards. If you can help by contributing very old cards, please do.

Picture library

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99/05/23 (10:20): Version 1.0
99/05/27 (22:35): Version 1.1. Changed references to XFree to XFree86 as suggested by Dirk