[LUAU] Intel Doubles Down on Linux
Hawaii Linux Institute
wp at HawaiiLinux.us
Wed Jul 27 12:47:52 PDT 2005
Jimen Ching wrote:
>As for 'accelerated' drivers; I recommend taking those comments with a
>large grain of salt. At work, a vendor says the video card and the driver
>they provided were 'accelerated'. But we found otherwise during regular
>use...
>
>
>
I think we are getting into the core of this subject. Writing a device
driver (& advertising it as such) is easy. But writing an optimized
driver for a device that's worth hundreds of millions of dollars (as in
the case of nVidia's accelerated video cards), is not. It was not until
very recently that I decided that there are enough benefits to switch
from "nv" to "nvidia" driver for my nVidia FX 5200 cards.
Everytime I heard complaints about how stupid/backward X is, I always
ask the instigator, whoever s/he is, to look at the Linux/UNIX version
of Abode Reader 7.0 vis-a-vis the Windows version (though I never did
this in a public forum). The point is not to prod how great X is (am I
going to kid myself?) but how far X has progressed and how intimate the
gap can be narrowed if enough sources are devoted to improving an X app.
For a matured program running on a desktop machine (meaning that the app
does all you want to do and you are familiar with how the app operates),
as far as user experience is concerned, driver is everything. In the
past, at least on the x86 side, device providers (most of them are based
in Taiwan), either (1) don't know/care about the Linux kernel, (2) don't
have any control/influence over how Linux kernel is developed, (3) don't
give a damn about Linux driver or assign the job to entry-level
employees, or, most likely, (4) all of the above.
Intel's move (to double down on Linux), if true, will eventually elevate
the status of certain (i.e., Intel-made) Linux device drivers to that of
Windows, thus opening up an opportunity for Linux to be acceptably
considered in the desktop arena. (& "Intel Inside" will no longer mean
"Idiot Inside".) But how should the Taiwanese periphery device makers
respond to Intel's move, is something their top execs should be deeply
concerned about. (A case in point: Intel's Centrino chipset has pretty
much driven Taiwanese chipset makers out of the NB business.) Wayne
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