VIA is extending their hand to the open source community, with a recent announcement that the company will be assisting in the development of an open source driver for their Chrome hardware. The Taiwanese manufacturer of integrated circuits will be working with the OpenChrome development team, creating drivers for the Chrome hardware found on various VIA platforms. In particular, VIA is mentioning current development involving support for multiple monitors and screen resolution changes.

The advantages of this cooperation are numerous, including having a single code base being developed by both the OSS community and VIA. Hardware acceleration for VIA GPUs would be a very welcome addition to their other hardware support. VIA has also released programming manuals for the hardware. For those of us who use boards with UniChrome, it would be great to get a fully functional hardware accelerated driver.