2010-06-13

xf86-video-geode: new contributors shake off the dust

A couple of years ago, the Geode X.org driver lost its main contributor, due to random attrition at AMD after the company experienced severe losses at the end of a quarter. Since then, yours truly and a few random contributors have been trying to keep this driver at least remotely usable, with mixed results.

Over the past few weeks, the driver has seen new contributions, thanks to the addition of two engineers from AMD Taiwan who have been going through the list of outstanding bugs and learning the ropes of collaborating with the Free Software community. This, in turn, had a snowball effect and motivated old contributors from the OLPC project and from the thin client community to return to the driver. Hurray!

Let's give a warm welcome to Frank Huang and Hunk Cui from AMD and, if you notice any issue with the driver that is not already reported, please file a report to help us become aware it.

Cheers!

2 comments:

MagicFab said...

Thank you for highlighting this contribution to Free software from AMD. Can you briefly share a bit more of the technical obstacles or problems these two new contributors are facing to get up to speed ?

Martin-Éric said...

Mart Raudsepp has been guiding them at learning the Free Desktop standards for formatting and submitting patches against upstream GIT.

Otherwise, the main obstacles at this point are about learning all the X.org subsystems and figuring out which ones our driver no longer complies with.