OneAndOneIs2

Since my PC is currently doing downtime, hopefully only temporarily, it seems an opportune time to reflect on what I'd like my next PC to be.

The biggest thing is, I want it to be 100% Linux-compatible. I've yet to encounter such a PC: One that you can just install Linux on and everything works, completely, out-of-the-box. ACPI, for instance, isn't that great under Linux (Mainly because of lousy implementation in hardware, I understand.) All graphics cards and most onboard graphics require proprietary drivers: Only Intel offers FOSS drivers for its graphics chips, and there's no such thing as an Intel card. You want Intel graphics, you have to buy an Intel motherboard.

And that's a pain, because I'm an AMD fan. In particular, as far as I can tell, AMD's 64-bit CPUs give better performance than Intel's (Benchmarks at a LUG meeting last year were quite impressive) and as I mentioned the other day, 64-bit is the way things are going right now.

There's hope, tho: A very bright light at the end of a not-too-long tunnel. Last year, AMD bought ATI. ATI and NVIDIA have been the big names in graphics cards for a long time, and NVIDIA's Linux support has been by far the better for a long time.

However, ATI has open-sourced drivers for some of its older cards. Its Linux support has been improving. And AMD are a very FOSS-friendly company.

Will we see open-source ATI drivers soon? Quite possibly not. There are alleged to be IP concerns over them that a merger won't get rid of.

However, one of the items on the Next Big Thing list is multi-core CPUs with built-in GPUs. In other words, a CPU that can do the normal maths CPUs already do, and the type of maths that, up until now, we've needed a separate GPU to do.

A GPU-on-CPU has advantages: Cheaper than two seperate processors, less complexity in your motherboards, and potentially hugely-increased communication speeds: A CPU can talk to its own components faster than even PCI-express can let it talk to a GPU on a card.

Since such a CPU would require a drastically new driver, it would be the perfect time to write one from scratch that could be open-sourced. AMD is already very popular amongst geeks, an AMD processor that does open-source 3D acceleration wouldn't just sell, it would scream off the shelves and be hungrily devoured.

I'll be surprised if something along these lines doesn't happen: There are many advantages in open-sourcing drivers, and if AMD doesn't start supplying an open-source graphics option, Intel will be the one to benefit.

The other thing AMD is doing is supporting LinuxBIOS. Some *very* impressive things could be done with an open-source BIOS on a computer that has open-source graphics functionality built right into the CPU. Can you imagine Grub/Lilo/bootsplashes that aren't just higher-res but actually 3D-accelerated? Can you imagine how fast you could boot an XGL/AIGLX/Compiz/Beryl/whatever Linux PC with a 32-bit BIOS that does 3D?

A motherboard that's sold with LinuxBIOS as an option would have to be, at the very least, well-supported by open-source. Most likely, it would be completely supported by open source. That means that a Linux-friendly BIOS replacement would boot a Linux kernel on a machine that has open-source drivers for every bit of hardware.

Such a PC would finally meet the ideal that some people claim Linux will never reach: You install Linux and everything works perfectly, out of the box, no downloads, no config-file-editing, no nothing. Suspend to RAM? You got it! 3D desktop? You got it! Wireless internet access? You got it!

Although even Intel still doesn't offer open-source WiFi drivers (Judging by their response to "How come?" questions being "We can't find anyone who can answer that", this is just because the people who have the power to do so haven't realized that they should do so), there are companies that do. AMD could easily build one of these chipsets into their up-and-coming LinuxBIOS-touting motherboards and make sure that even this last stronghold of binary blobs doesn't withstand the FOSS-friendly nature of their product.

So that's what I want to build into my next PC. A bunch of hardware that's wholly-supported by open source drivers. Something that I can put any Linux distro onto and know it will work 100% right from the start.

The only problem right now, of course, is that as yet, it doesn't exist.

But it will!