Linux users are often at the mercy of hardware vendors when it comes to device drivers. The open source community often needs to turn to reverse engineering to churn out drivers from proprietary ones.

I bumped into Dirk Hohndel, Intel's Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, at OSCON last week and started probing him on Intel's open-source activities. As it turns out, for a hardware company, Intel writes a heck of a lot of software. Dirk and I found time to talk about Intel's open-source involvement in depth. This interview was born.

This afternoon Intel's Chief Linux and Open-Source Technologist, Dirk Hohndel, talked about why Intel's commitment to open-source drivers creates a difference and advantage for Intel's architecture platforms

While ATI/AMD claim that they provide enough support for developing open source ATI Radeon drivers, developers of open source drivers tell a much different story. Very few of them have specifications, and those are stripped down and a lot of needed information is missing from them so they have to use time-consuming error-prone reverse engineering.

Manufacturers today produce a dizzying array of video hardware whose graphics processing power alone outstrips entire computer systems of just ten years ago. However, it’s not always been easy for Linux users to take advantage of this hardware. Until recently, the more exotic 3D acceleration features in particular have often required introducing closed source, proprietary drivers.

Many Linux users are after lobbying hardware manufacturers for open-source graphics drivers or specifications for complex pieces of hardware, but an effort is underway to get hardware specifications for something very simple, a remote control.

The Free Software and Open Source community is always asking for hardware manufacturers to write free and open source software (from now on called FOSS) drivers. So, let's try to guess what would happen if nVidia decided to release the graphics drivers as FOSS.

At the LinuxCon conference (Webcast from Portland), Intel's Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open source technologist, gave what I thought was one of the best versions of the 'how to be successful in open source' talks I've ever heard.

AMD just announced that its upcoming Catalyst 7.9 drivers for Linux will not only finally provide support to HD 2000 series on the OS, but it is also claimed to host the most significant series of enhancements ever for Linux users. As far as AMD graphics drivers are concerned, that is.