just came across this very long discussion which took a while to wade through.

Long ago I was an embedded developer, before linux existed, and used to write deveice drivers usign in-circuit-emulators to debug them. Quite often the documentation on the chips involved was out of date, incomplete, incorrect or even completely wrong. Usually, what I relied on was a working example. The worked example might have no error checking, be relatively crude, be a bit buggy, but it was often the best documentation you got!

Now, I've never written a device drive for linux, so I can't tell anyone how hard or easy it'd be to write a video driver for the chips in question, but what I can say is that (probably) if we had the summary guide to the video chip's registers and a worked example of how to set it up for each function it can do, then we could probably have a basic but useful working driver.

Once the right people get their hands on some code which makes the video do interesting stuff, they would get confidence and learn more. At the moment it's a "black box" which has been disabled, so noone knows what promises it might hide.

Anyone remember the Amiga and HAM, and the "copper". I remember writing hacky copper "assembler" code to put horizontal stripes of colour on the screen and getting an insight into what could be done. HAM mode was an experimental thing that was nearly removed from the chips, it was left in to be be lazy, and became one of the Amiga's successes! This is a lesson to Nokia: don't assume because *you* think something's useless that other people might have no use for it!

Maybe the video accelerator, if it can't be used directly for generating video, could have other purposes like decoding/pre-rendering stuff, or even non-video math acceleration! Take a look at Nvidia's "cuda" for ideas: http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_get.html