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Valve is one company which has been developing a distro internally. nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to

Valve is one company which has been developing a distro internally. nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. Yesterday, both companies stepped forward and announced what they've been up to lately. Neither of them have noted any relevancy at all to each others developments and (as an outsider) it seems unreasonable to speculate on such based on timing alone. SteamOS is unlikely to ever use nouveau and nVidia is even more unlikely to consider SteamOS as a reason to release documents for nouveau. Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
>nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. // You know this for a fact? It's not that the announcement was made now to gain traction in the Linux community and push forward Nvidia as the graphics company for Linux then? It surprises me a bit. Too be honest I'd have thought Nvidia would need to document their drivers for internal purposes and that the detail already in the internal documentation would be more than sufficient for the Nouveau team to use. But I'm an outsider to GPU engineering and programming in general really so a misapprehension is quite likely. >Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day. Indeed but you'd expect Nvidia, or similar, to be manoeuvring themselves to align with Steam's announcement.
- swetland 13y ago
  If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list about a single document being dropped and mention of work going on to provide more (but unlikely all) docs in the future. Just because two things happen on the same day (or within a week of each other, etc) doesn't mean they're closely connected. Having worked closely with silicon vendors in the past, the situation that there are no internal docs or that the docs are horribly outdated or incorrect compared to the HDL or source code, is pretty common. When the only consumer of docs is an internal team, it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need (or a company would be willing to release without serious cleanup and checking).
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    >If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list // You're probably right. That said your view of PR seems naive. It looks far better to release on social networks that someone found that CompanyN was "already" working on something than it does that there's an official press release. The channel used here - mailing list to social networks - doesn't tell us much IMO. >it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need // You think they'd be worse than the nothing that is currently provided by many hardware manufacturers.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago

>nVidia is another company which has been working on polishing up some documents in order to release them on their FTP site. // You know this for a fact? It's not that the announcement was made now to gain traction in the Linux community and push forward Nvidia as the graphics company for Linux then? It surprises me a bit. Too be honest I'd have thought Nvidia would need to document their drivers for internal purposes and that the detail already in the internal documentation would be more than sufficient for the Nouveau team to use. But I'm an outsider to GPU engineering and programming in general really so a misapprehension is quite likely. >Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day. Indeed but you'd expect Nvidia, or similar, to be manoeuvring themselves to align with Steam's announcement.

swetland 13y ago
If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list about a single document being dropped and mention of work going on to provide more (but unlikely all) docs in the future. Just because two things happen on the same day (or within a week of each other, etc) doesn't mean they're closely connected. Having worked closely with silicon vendors in the past, the situation that there are no internal docs or that the docs are horribly outdated or incorrect compared to the HDL or source code, is pretty common. When the only consumer of docs is an internal team, it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need (or a company would be willing to release without serious cleanup and checking).
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >If this were about PR it wouldn't be a post to a technical mailing list // You're probably right. That said your view of PR seems naive. It looks far better to release on social networks that someone found that CompanyN was "already" working on something than it does that there's an official press release. The channel used here - mailing list to social networks - doesn't tell us much IMO. >it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need // You think they'd be worse than the nothing that is currently provided by many hardware manufacturers.