One of those explanations that show up how hard this business can be. Thank you for sharing this knowledge with us, not every company would do so...
Can I ask, after some assumptions...:

1.- The graphics driver is only available for Linux. What happens to different operating systems?

2.- It will do less than the old Efika?!

3.- If we want more graphics capabilities, we are forced to plug in one of those old graphics cards, nearly unobtainable these days? This effectively ruins the concept of a single board computer with low power requirements.

Hi jcmarcos, we have the source code so any OS can be a target.

There is a large amount of effort going on behind the scenes.

It is not always just the technology driving success. We are sure you can appreciate that.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

The driver is platform agnostic - it requires like any well-written driver, some little host functionality like memory management, but this is all abstracted. It's built as a portable binary which can be linked to the appropriate support libraries. If there is interest we can work on those support libraries..
No. It will do more. Your Efika doesn't display graphics at all :)
In an ideal world you wouldn't be forced to do anything, in the real world, you simply may not be able to anyway.. the Efika had a PCI/AGP riser for the simple purpose of providing graphics, it was never intended as a design decision to serve any other purpose (although it does as a side effect, the AGP riser *is* the purpose of the PCI slot).

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Matt Sealey

Sad News!

It is gone.

We will now longer try to support XGI cards. We devoted much time and energy to this effort, but never saw a reciprocal response from XGI. The AMD/ATI solution will be back...

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

We got an okay response from XGI but they didn't have near the resources required to bring up what we needed; the open source driver suffers the same problems relating to the 3D support, and XvMC support and sourcing documentation took forever to work out.

I still have an Efika with an XGI card and so do a lot of others, so I'm going to keep on top of the situation as it progresses and maybe there will be a working, packaged version of xf86-video-xgi with the bugs fixed to support existing customers, but there will certainly not be a projects program or any real energy from Genesi on the matter apart from maybe putting my oar in when SuSE or Fedora etc. decides to ship it on a distribution CD and it doesn't work on Efika or PowerPC in general (I find it hard to believe it didn't even compile considering Ian Romanick is developing the drivers for the IBM Bimini board, but then he's using another XGI chip with different specs.. but thanks to Luca for sending in that fix anyway :)

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Matt Sealey