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  • Hacker News
  • What kind of motherboard has no onboard iGPU these days?
  • Will you upstream it?
  • Hmmm... How about adding it to the Free Software Foundation's "respects your freedom" hardware list?
  • Proprietary drivers for obscure hardware were the bane of my existence. Glad to see this SM750 driver open-sourced.
  • NGL, I read the title initially as Why open source rocks? - a new SM750 (Silicon Motion GPU) HDMI Driver

    And got excited that you were open sourcing a chip.

  • Hey, how did you iterate on it? Quite interested in your process here considering you say it’s vibe coded. The iteration loop is crucial for that.
  • A GPU with HDMI and 16MB of VRAM is a very strange combination.
  • I wrote* a modern Linux driver that supports ultrawide resolutions, higher refresh, and faster performance than the original driver(s) on this cheap HDMI only variant server GPU.

    I created it because I wanted my Nvidia GPUs to be compute only, and needed a cheap and small display GPU to run X11. I bought this GPU on AliExpress, after learning it had Linux support. It does, but kernel 5.x series and the sm750 driver in modern Linux only supports the older VGA/DVI variants.

    Rather than send it back or throw it away, I decided to vibe code a new driver with new features, to make it usable for day to day desktop use. I've a little bit of a background in low level graphics so also added a cool little magic ordered dither (a pretty good one I think!) I devised myself, called "bbdither", and a few hacks to get 2560x1080 at 75hz on a device only officially documented as capable of up to 1920x1200 at 60hz, and PCI-E 1x speed.

    Screenshots here: https://github.com/KodeMunkie/sm750hdmifb#screenshots

    If you try it out, be careful - read the project disclaimer :)

    *Vibe coded, as mentioned in Hackernews comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415282

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