[Open-graphics] Press release, VGA project, need to make progress

[Russell Shaw]

André Pouliot wrote:
> Russell Shaw wrote:
>> Timothy Normand Miller wrote:
>>> On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 7:13 AM, Dieter <netbsd at sopwith.solgatos.com> 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> But we need to think of things that make us say "I'd pay
>>>>> $1500 to be able to do that specific thing better."  They can be
>>>>> relatively niche applications, though.  I spoke with someone at Pixar,
>>>>> and unfortunately, hardware acceleration of rendering isn't
>>>>> interesting to THEM because it's so much easier to just add more CPUs
>>>>> to their rendering farm.
>>>> Is there something OGD1 could do to enhance medical images?  X-rays,
>>>> MRI scans, ...
>>>
>>> Lots of things.  Zoom, rotate, windowing and leveling, high bit-depth
>>> grayscale, various convolution filters, etc.
>>>
>>>> Some other high-value imaging use?  The app would need to be something
>>>> that the FPGA could do faster and/or cheaper than CPU/GPU.
>>>
>>> Anything that can benefit from huge amounts of parallelism or which is
>>> going to be much faster to get to a monitor (or other I/O device)
>>> directly from on-card memory.
>>>
>>>> What do customers do with those other FPGA products?  Would OGD1
>>>> be a better choice for any of them?
>>>
>>> I'm sure.  We just need to figure out what those application areas
>>> are.  If we had a bigger library of IP that we could license, that
>>> would certainly help.  I'm surprised no one's come after our PCI
>>> controller yet, given how expensive the alternatives are.  On the
>>> other hand, memory controllers tend to be "free" with many FPGAs.
>>
>> I asked about the pci thing in a previous post and was ignored.
> The pci core is free and from the beginning it was said and written that 
> way. But I'm not sure since when it's working. Most or all of the work 
> on the pci was done by Timothy when he had time.
>>
>> I suggested the vga thing in a previous post and was ignored.
> We are working to get the vga working at least as a frame buffer since a 
> long time. A demo with working but not free code was made at a 
> conference, I don't remember what conference it was.
>>
>> I said in a previous post some other more baseline functionality
>> should have been available before the high-end graphics stuff was
>> working and was ignored.
> The only part of the high-end graphics stuff working right now or done 
> is the simulator, and some basic math block.
>>
>> I don't need any of this stuff now because i've worked around it.
> 
> Would you like to tell us what you've done to work around it? We always 
> welcome constructive comment or work.
> 
> Sorry if you have fell ignored when you post, it happen. There are a lot 
> of people who don't get answer when they post question or request help, 
> but those who could answer sometime just don't have the time or it was 
> already discuss before.

I've figured out how to get the X server and kernel drivers to do what i want
with any graphics card. As for pci, i won't bother with it when pci-express
is now the current fad.