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[Open-graphics]: CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS (PCI and VGA)
Posted by: gunne on Thursday, April 21, 2005 - 23:48
Submitted by Trizt
The Open Graphics Project is looking for people who are willing to take part of the hardware design for the LGPL based graphics board. For more information, read the mail from the mailing list.
Now that some major business items are nearly taken care of, and we've set our priorities for completion of the prototype board, we are now ready to call out to the community to those who would like to participate in the hardware design process.

All publically developed RTL will be licensed under LGPL and freely shared from the beginning.

The two major blocks we would like help on are the HOST INTERFACE (PCI/AGP) and the VGA CONTROLLER.

Our business model suggests that we should protect some of the hardware implementation (but not the specs) for a period of time, although we are currently talking with some free software people about the idea of a community buy-out where that RTL is released under GPL and/or LGPL much earlier. The buy-out would be treated as a capital investment in the business. In the mean time, we feel that sharing the development of some parts with the community would be beneficial for all around.

The top item for more than one of our priority lists is the host interface. For this, we feel that there would be a great deal of value to countless hardware projects if there were a unified PCI/AGP controller freely available. We'll begin by drawing up specs for various things, like the interface between the controller and the rest of the design, behavior of the DMA controller, interface to the PROM, etc. We'll also share the implementation process with the community.

Secondly, there is the VGA core. We don't need something as extensive as what's on opencores.org. We need something that, compactly, emulates a minimum subset of the VGA hardware spec so that a PC can boot and Windows can put up its splash screens. So, the FIRST thing we need is a SPEC. We need to draw up a document that describes the HARDWARE register set, which means things like the I/O-space register addresses, what the bits mean in those registers, the memory layout addresses, what the bits mean in those registers, the memory layout for various text and graphics modes, etc. A separate spec should be drawn up for the (BSD-licensed) BIOS, and those efforts need to be coordinated so that we can be sure the hardware does what it needs to do. The SECOND part of this development is the VGA emulation core itself. We would also like to share this development with the community.


We are making a call out now to volunteers to participate in these developments.


Thanks.


-- Timothy Miller

Hardware
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