Monday, February 5, 2007

OpenGL on Solaris

One of our on-going challenges at Tadpole has been to locate a graphics chip that can provide hardware acceleration of OpenGL operations, has power, heat, and real-estate constraints suitable for use in a laptop, has SPARC drivers (or open-sourced drivers), and can be made to operate with legacy Solaris applications.

It seems that the market place is conspiring to create products that are unsuitable for use in mobile platforms and are closed. I'm not sure what the market can do, but we need to let the chip manufacturers know that the FOSS community needs open drivers for platforms other than x86, and that we need solutions suitable for use in systems without a few square meters and a few hundred watts to power them.

(ATI, Nvidia, I'm looking squarely at you!)

We also really need to pressure Sun into opening up their OpenGL implementation, so that either drivers to plugin to their implementation or alternate (and compatible) implementations can be created.

(FYI, alternate implementations of OpenGL exist from vendors like XiG, but they are not ABI compatible due to Sun's closed & proprietary ABI.)

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