Messages in this thread | | | From | John Bradford <> | Subject | Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers? | Date | Tue, 31 Dec 2002 14:31:21 +0000 (GMT) |
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> > Are drivers for Alpha, Sparc, or anything else with a pci slot apart > > from an X86 machine available? > > Unfortunately, that wouldn't be enought. There are lots of PCI graphics > cards available, which still only work in an X86 (and in most cases Alpha) > machines, although there is an open source driver. The reason is that they > need the initialisation code in their PCI BIOS, which is X86, binary > code.
Sorry, I didn't really explain what I meant very well. I realise that it's not just a case of getting the driver to compile on other architectures, what I meant was that if the driver is open source then anybody is free to work on the support for non-X86 boxes. If it's closed source, then only the manufacturer can work on it.
> Alpha works around this by using an X86 emulator in their PAL code.
That's interesting, I didn't know that. How complete is it? Does it just emulate a subset of X86 instructions that are enough for 90% of initialisation code?
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