Recent events and discussions regarding the OGP:

• Andy is making progress on the PCB. We recently posted a BOM (bill of materials) to the mailing list, which spawned some discussion about features of both OGD (the dev board) and which subset will end up in OGA (the ASIC).
• A recent discussion on LKML about allowing binary-only drivers has caught some attention. The raison d'être of the OGP is to solve the problem of needing binary drivers, at least for graphics cards, so we're working on a statement to post there.
• Still looking for someone to spearhead the subproject to create the Traversal website.
• Some discussions about the PCI bus bottleneck and how to reduce the burden. These have centered around the fact that image uploads are common and data-intensive, so we're talking about ways to compress the images before sending them (via DMA) to the GPU.
• Both the OGP and Traversal need "mission statements". In the event that a company were to make Traversal an unrefusable offer for acquisition, we would want to ensure our integrity and not allow company X to corrupt our ideals. Such a mission statement would become part of a contract. In this same spirity, we are working on a template proposal that we would give to potential acquirers.
• Still looking for help with PCI, VGA, and memory controller cores. Those will be under GPL licenses. Note that the PCI core in the SVN repository is broken because I checked in a partial implementation as a backup.

Lots more going on.

For those who would like to get involved in the process of designing open architecture hardware, you might consider joining the Open Graphics Mailing List.

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