Slashdot Mirror

You either don't know what you're talking about or just plainly trolling. The GPU specs that Intel opened is the CoreHD graphics series which is Intel's own GPU technology and is in no way related to ImgTech's PowerVR.

I am looking forward though to the real competition between ARM's latest and greatest with Intel's upcoming Haswell.

I second your observation about Intel drivers. Intel has invested a lot of real labor into Linux graphics and chipset drivers and the result is impressive. Running a sandybridge quad with Intel's integrated GPU and it is simply the most stable and nonsense free *nix desktop I've ever seen.

My next motherboard has a new requirement as a result; it must have HDMI or DisplayPort to leverage the integrated GPU, even though I will have a discrete GPU as well. The Intel stuff is just too good to neglect.

AMD has simply continued the tradition of ATI with half-baked unfocused driver work. It's a shame. I've never bought an AMD graphics device for exactly this reason. Thousands of lost revenue to AMD.

I can foresee the day when FPS no longer matter to me. Then, I will abandon NVIDIA and it's miserable, proprietary ways and rely on Intel.

Windows 7 comes with a paid for H.264 codec while XP, and Linux? Do NOT. And yet again you are mistaking HARDWARE FOR software. dxva AND va-api are simple APIs but do NOT, I repeat do NOT give you the H.264 codec.

This is completely incorrect. The entire purpose of the DXVA, VA-API, and VDPAU APIs is to allow video bitstreams to be sent directly to the graphics hardware for decoding. See, for instance, this page on Intel Linux graphics which specifically states that Intel's newer graphics chips support H.264 hardware decoding on Linux via VA-API. Newer versions of VLC have the ability to use these protocols. The way these APIs work is that you hand them a video bitstream and they give you back pointers to decoded frames. Your software never needs to touch the patented decoding steps; that's all done in hardware and/or firmware which already has its license fees paid by the manufacturer. You said there was something on the Mozilla Blog saying the opposite of this, but I was unable to find any such article there. In fact, they are going to be supporting H.264 on mobile devices using basically the same method I outlined here (sending bitstreams to low-level APIs that talk directly to the hardware).

Good luck getting real open source drivers out of Nvidia, ATI/AMD, and Intel for their graphics hardware.

Intel develops open source drivers for their graphics hardware. See for yourself on their Intel Linux Graphics website. Intel worked with Valve recently to improve their drivers for Valve's games. Phoronix has some statistics on the development history of Intel's open source drivers.

A free driver is completely useless with a non-free firmware. Whether firmware is hardware or software or part of the driver is irrelevant.

For the intel firmware, see http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

Ironically enough, while intel is the only manufacturer making free graphics, its wifi is notoriously proprietary. And usually if you get one, you will get the other as well. And to add injury to insult, many vendors have a very short whitelist of approved wifi cards you can swap in... (can be cracked but takes effort and is not guaranteed to work)

Man, it seems like every other sentence in that article is a link to another Phoronix article. I count 14 Phoronix links in there, and the actual link to the Intel docs is buried in the middle of that.
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html

The documentation referenced is available from Intel Linux Graphics: Documentation.

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ demands to differ. How's them apples, Will Hunting?

No, they provide drivers for linux, they don't provide open source drivers, which only Intel does : http://intellinuxgraphics.org/license.html

For that, they deserve all the advertisement they can get from the community.

Use Linux?

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

All Intel drivers are open source on Linux. I have no idea about code quality or upkeep, so I will say nothing except I know they add regularly.

I really really want to know what AMD, NVidia, and Intel think about the change.

As for Intel: Wayland was started by Kristian Høgsberg, of Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OSTC).

It's tricky for any *nix kernel driver hacker to write GPU code when the hardware is locked and proprietary, and these hardware vendors only offered official Windows drivers.

See Intel for example, are now working to open the hardware, these details were never available to anyone wanting to write driver code back then, so *nix got a little behind on the GPU side.

I recon in about 5 years that would have changed a great deal.

do you really need to boot the machine with a livecd? by intel/realtek wireless, buy HP/Epson printers/scanners, by just about any nvidia/intel/amd videocard you want(GMA500 is to be avoided). Other than that, i'm not aware of a lot of main stream hardware that doesn't work. Have any examples that i didn't already cover?

Printer/scanner compatibility can be found at http://www.linuxprinting.org/
AMD compatability can be found at https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/linux/catalyst_107_linux.pdf
nvidia compatibility found at http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux-display-amd64-256.44-driver.html
Intel graphics compatibility found at http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html
NDISWrapper compatibility found at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ndiswrapper/index.php?title=Main_Page

Fedora and Red Hat provide Free Software in their repositories. It's trivial to install the non-Free drivers (and their associated hidden bugs) supplied by NVIDIA.

In addition to that Debian, Red Hat and Novell and Intel and other honest players have spent huge amounts of time coding up Free drivers with the Nouveau project (free NVIDIA drivers), Intel drivers, and ATI/AMD drivers

Sounds like the only one saying a big FUCK YOU is your self.

AMD and Intel need to have a contest on the shittiest driver category. I have one of each. Each revision of xserver-xorg-video-intel bricks my laptop in a new and exciting way. And AMD's fglrx is a steaming pile of rendering errors, inconsistent performance, and crashes.

On the other hand, both Intel and AMD have released specs and participate in open source development. So in the long run, either one is a better choice than NVidia. So I'll continue to complain about them and submit bug reports. It's the open source way.

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

Intel has provided open source drivers and specs for their graphics hardware for several years now.

Too bad their cards aren't as good as their intentions, though. But those drivers do work very well for me and my laptop.

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

Intel has provided open source drivers and specs for their graphics hardware for several years now.

I mean an Intel GMA 4500 MHD (X4500 HD for desktops). Both the tech specs and Linux drivers are freely available. I got it because I needed h264 decoding and prefer open spec. 3D performance is good enough for circa 2005 games.

I mean an Intel GMA 4500 MHD (X4500 HD for desktops). Both the tech specs and Linux drivers are freely available. I got it because I needed h264 decoding and prefer open spec. 3D performance is good enough for circa 2005 games.

Intel has shown real commitment to supporting their video hardware on Linux with full time staff employed to produce high quality open source drivers in addition to providing open specifications for (most) of their contemporary hardware. Unfortunately this hardware provides only limited 3D acceleration. I was hoping that Larrabee would conflate these two and provide vendor supported, open, high performance accelerated 3D for Linux.

So much for that happening anytime soon...

I can't understand why Intel cedes the GPU market to it's competitors. Have I been getting duped into paying hundreds while everyone else gets free GPUs? People are paying good money for these chips, right? NVidia's got Playstation 3 and Apple. ATI got the 360. Intel has nothing the the discrete GPU market at all. Why? What blocker within Intel prevents them from taking a piece of that pie?

Exactly, it's a driver issue. If Intel created a good Linux driver, or provided the specifications to those who would happily write it for them, it would perform equally as well(if not better) than it does with Windows.

Sigh. The Intel driver is open source, and they have released the specs. http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

The driver is still crappy, stop searching for excuses and accept it.

We really need a company to publish all the specifications and produce GPL-compatible GNU/Linux drivers,

We already have that. It's a little company called Intel

This isn't hardware they licensed, it is in-house designed stuff. Are you trying to tell me that they built chips, yet have no documentation on pinouts, low-level register settings or functional hardware blocks? Exactly what did their in-house software team use to develop the reference drivers?

Cry me a river. If they don't consider the Linux/FOSS market big enough to worry about then say so and be done with it. Intel will gladly take their business.

If you're simply saying "this will take time", then fine. As long as they are interested in taking that path, patience is a virtue. However, it wasn't mentioned in the article and I was bringing it up as a possibility. The preferred one, from many perspectives.

I know about ATI releasing the specs, which is why I said it might have gotten better now, though I guess it's going to be some time before we see anything happen (but it probably will)

I hope so, but Intel has released comprehensive driver docs for a long time, and their driver still sucks.

What negative comments? I see no comments attacking nVidia. Comments questioning the useful of hardware accelerated physics, sure.

But if you want a good reason for Slashdot to hate nVidia, their refusal to release open source drivers is as good a reason as any.

Both Intel and AMD/ATI have open source drivers. OK, well, so AMD/ATI only claimed they were going to open source their drivers. It appears they never actually did. But, uh...

What we need for our audio workstations is a fanless (silent) graphics card that will do OpenGL nicely, using Free/Libre/Open Source drivers. Affordable is helpful, but not essential.

I've been watching the gradual progress of the Open Graphics Project (and now Open Hardware Foundation) with interest and hope they can release something good before the major manufacturers get a clue - quite likely considering their years of promises (ATI) and proprietary drivers (nVidia). It seems that Intel are doing good things, although IIUC those cards aren't so powerful; I know: power, silence, freedom (choose TWO only)... but progress? Is the ATI Radeon 8500 still the best fanless card with open drivers?

Please wake me up when we get to the 21st Century. I'd happily read a whole page of adverts for news on such a product.

Whatever - all I want to see is open specs on the cards, and support for open drivers a la Intel. Then I'll start thinking about buying ATI/NVIDIA.

Intel has been supporting open source drivers for their video hardware for quite some time now. I suppose the hardware isn't nearly as sexy as that from nVidia or ATI, but it is an option.

I don't know where you get that one from, intel have open sourced the drivers for their graphics chips. I suppose they could have done it in an unfriendly way.

Only some. On the newer motherboards. See here. Make your life easier and more productive. Sell the crap hardware from proprietary companies that haven't seen the new market conditions before it's too late.

Not always with open source drivers, but it will be able to be Linux-compatible.

While the Dell/Ubuntu deal is definitely a major victory in the name of “Linux” and Open Source, the inclusion of proprietary drivers will still prevent many people who value freedom--including me--from purchasing one of these machines. I run gNewSense, which is a distribution of GNU+Linux based on Ubuntu, minus the proprietary components (drivers, firmware, etc.) When I can purchase a machine that doesn't force me to use proprietary software in order to use any piece of its hardware, then I'll make a purchase. Until then, as some may say, “Close, but no cigar.”

From yesterday's direct2dell blog post on the topic:

For device types where a choice exists between a component with a non-Free driver and one with Free driver availability, in our Linux offering we'll opt to bundle the component with the Free driver. Wireless network adapters is one such example; Printers are another. We recommend Linux users buy our printers which have PostScript engines in them, as opposed to those which don't and for which no Linux drivers are yet available. The Tech Specs tab for each printer on dell.com show if it has PostScript or not.

Some components, particularly some video cards, have working 2-D open source drivers, open source 3-D drivers actively being clean-room written by the community, and closed-source 3-D drivers available from the video card manufacturer. In these instances, while we continue to encourage the development (by all parties) towards open source drivers, we will provide the closed-source drivers for people who wish to use them.

The last category is devices for which no open source drivers are available at all, such as software-based modems. In our desktops these are add-in cards, so you can substitute a hardware-based modem available from your local electronics store quite easliy. However, we can't substitute hardware-based modems in our notebooks without redesigning and significantly increasing the price of the system. If it's important to you to have a hardware-based modem, you would add one into your PC Card or ExpressCard slot.

My bone of contention comes from several decisions Dell has made:

• Opting to go with ATI and NVIDIA instead of Intel for 3D graphics.
• Using softmodems that don't have free drivers in these machines. There are softmodems available that have free drivers. For the desktops, hardware modems could've been used “out of the box”. Dell still chose the proprietary softmodem route across the board. While it is true that I could purchase one of their desktops and replace the modem, I would still be giving my money to the manufacturer of the proprietary hardware. I simply won't do that.

On the bright side, however, Dell did state the following directly after explaining the three “categories” of drivers (emphasis mine):

Dell recognizes the importance of open source, GPL-licensed drivers which are maintained upstream in kernel.org. They allow users the widest choice of Linux distributions, effectively taking the specific hardware and distribution out of the decision-making process and let you focus on solving your business problems. We will work with our hardware partners to develop, test, and maintain Free drivers, and continue to make progress towards that goal for all drivers. Most drivers are in good shape now, but there's clearly longer-term work to be done. Work that we're doing now at the driver level will pave the way for more Linux offerings in the future. There's no way to please everyone, but I'll continue to shar

I'm not going to directly disagree with you because I'm unsure how you'd define the above. What 3D tasks do you want the card to do? Because if all you want is basic 3D acceleration good enough for e.g. TuxRacer or Open Arenaand the fun desktop effects with Compiz/Beryl then Intel has very nicely provided complete Free/OpenSource drivers for most of their integrated components (*) including the GMA X3000 integrated graphics chips. The latter chips apparently do T&L shaders and other good stuff which is actually better supported under GNU/Linux than Windows Vista.

Of course, if what you're talking about is CAD or something really GPU intensive then you may be more out of luck, but I'm interested to know exactly what that is?

If Intel start making graphics card with more power to compete with nvidia and ati there they will find a lot of Linux support as they are the only ones which currently have open source drivers http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ I'm all for supporting Intel move into graphics cards as long as they continue to help produce good linux drivers

If one is only interested in a free (libre) graphic driver for Linux, one could check the the status of hardware accelerated 3D support on the Direct Rendering Infrastructure project wiki.

Here is, more or less, the lay of the land as of today:
Intel: i810 and newer are officially supported by Intel
ATI: Radeon 7000 up to X850 offer 3D support through a reverse engineered driver. Generally better performing than Intel although not quite as stable.
VIA: On-board Unichrome video has a free driver included with X. Not sure if VIA has helped with development or not but I had working 3D out-of-the-box running Ubuntu on a VIA EPIA motherboard that I purchased recently.
Matrox: G200, G400, G450 and G550 have accelerated 3D support with X driver. Not sure if Matrox had any hand in this.
nVIDIA: There is currently NO hardware accelerated 3D with a free driver for any nVIDIA chipset. This may change in the future due to efforts by the Nouveau project but nVIDIA is definitely not helping the situation.

So if you want to reward a vendor for Linux support, buy Intel. If you want higher performance and a free driver, buy ATI. If you already own nVIDIA, help the Nouveau project.

I've already reported on one bug and will probably file a few more reports in the weeks ahead.

As I said, I specifically ordered the Intel 3945 wireless (and 945GM video), but it would not install out of the box. I had to track down the drivers from Intel and other sites. Our last laptop had a 2200 series Intel wireless card which wouldn't install out of the box either because the firmware couldn't be redistributed. As for the video, I don't call offering a site where someone has to download source from a repository and compile the driver particularly friendly to non-technical users. Intel suggests getting a binary version from the distro maintainers, but a search of Linux user forums suggests that finding such a beast has not proved easy for people using a wide range of distros.

While it would be nice to live in a world where mainstream vendors offer pre-installed Linux, and while there might be system manufacturers who offer that alternative, the vast majority of potential Linux users are buying preconfigured systems from major manufacturers. If Linux won't install cleanly on those systems, they won't be trying Linux again any time soon.

As I also said, I'm not a Linux newbie, and I encourage people to consider it as an alternative to Windows all the time. I've installed many different distros on many different systems over the years. Most of the time it's gone smoothly, but sometimes it does not. It's always been a lot easier to install Linux in a server setting where you don't care about video, wireless, etc., than it is to install on a modern workstation where all those things need to work from the beginning. I understand the constraints that proprietary code, patented algorithms, and arcane hardware can impose. All I'm saying is that one can select supposedly "supported" hardware configurations that neverthless pose installation problems for many distros.

> Having ruled out ATI and Nvidia, that would be who, exactly?

Intel.

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

I was impressed by the author's attention to detail and clear specification of the tested systems and the steps involved in using them.

One useful correction would be that programs are just as easy to install on .rpm-based systems as they are on .deb-based systems. The default tool on Fedora Core 6 is called YUM and it does all the dependency resolving necessary. There are even simpler front ends to it such as Pup and Pirut. Package installation, deinstallation, upgrade and update are just as easy as they are with Aptitude.

The problems that the author experiences with 64-bit Flash are unfortunately a result of there being insufficient pressure from GNU/Linux consumers on vendors to supply Free software. A similar problem is experience by many Ubuntu users that rely on the non-Free drivers produced by Nvidia for their graphics cards, or the various non-free binary blobs used for some dodgy wireless hardware. This will continue to be a problem as long as distributions like Ubuntu facilitate the manufacturers of this hardware in evading one of the central principles of Free Software. The manufacturers can't do a good enough job of staying current with the kernel and so GNU/Linux will always be a second class citizen as long as we accept this. Fortunately there are manufacturers, such as Intel that provide Free software for their 3D graphics cards and their wireless chipsets and so it's worth choosing their components when building a new system. (I used to buy ATI stuff because the Free 3d drivers were better than the Free Nvidia ones, but apparently the nouveau project is opening up the list of working Free Nvidia cards. I'll probably be giving Nvidia and ATI both a miss in favour of Intel though).

Unfortunately Mark Shuttleworth is a short-term thinker who is pushing many of the Ubuntu developers into including binary, closed blobs that work until you update your system. This is the tired old "I'm a pragmatist" line which has been releiving the pressure on manufacturers to open their drivers and on users to choose non-closed hardware while purchasing new systems. It's anything but pragmatic and leads to the sort of frustrations seen in the article.

Thank you for mentioning the Intel drivers. Always good to see what they're up to; makes me glad that my laptop happened to come with Intel video (915GM chipset).

Yes AMD bought ATI, and so far I haven't seen any change in their policies w.r.t. open source drivers.

Contrary to all the rumours after the AMD/ATI merger, Intel still haven't bought nVidia, so I don't understand the parenthetical "ok, Intel" after nVidia.

Intel are releasing open source drivers for their graphics chips http://intellinuxgraphics.org/ (and have been for some time now).

Interesting timing. I have a E6600 system on order with a $50 Asus EAX550 video card based on the hoary ATI R300 core so I could run an open source video driver. Plenty fast enough for 2D and potentially some low-end (non-game) 3D. I tried hard to find something newer and faster, but failed. Matrox has a fully open source driver for some of its older cards, expensive, with lamentable performance, and the second head wouldn't drive the required frequency, which completely negates Matrox's long standing reputation for excellent finals. What I used to like about Matrox is you always knew what you were getting, even if it was a little behind the curve. Then the day came when Microsoft update pushed a new Matrox driver that eliminated multidesk support with narry a "this might screw you over" or "really do this?" I was in the middle of a deadline push and lost half a day discovering that Matrox had fed this into the Microsoft update pipeline in full deliberation. It proved faster to buy an ATI product than research alternative multidesk implementations in software. Still, I have a fondness for what Matrox used to stand for back when NVidia was setting benchmark records with finals that rendered fifty tints of pastel grey.

Since I collected these links just two days ago, I might as well include them:

http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/talks/ols06/ols2006. odp -- DCC 2006, MIME problem, but opens with evince directly
http://www.skynet.ie/~airlied/talks/ddc05/ddc_pres .sxi -- DCC 2005, didn't read this one myself
http://free3d.org/
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item =576&num=1
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item =463&num=1

The only other alternative is to use some other crap which suffers from exactly the same problems.

With new technology like AIGLX, XGL and XEGL emerging, having open source drivers for 3d cards is very important.

While I agree with this statement, I think this project is the wrong way to go about it, simply because we do finally have a vendor who has committed to open source driver support: Intel. Now, I will grant you that their cards are slow and crappy but they should be up to the task of accelerating the linux desktop. Also, the current release supports only an integrated video chipset and some older cards... but voting with your dollars is an absolute necessity. For any non-gamer, it should be a sufficiently powerful graphics system, and the G965 Express Chipset supports Core 2 Duo and Pentium D, so you can combine it with very good CPU power. If I were building a system today (aka if I could afford to build a system today) this is the combination I would elect to use.

But most importantly, we need to monetarily support vendors who give us working hardware with working linux drivers, or even vendors who simply give us enough information to write drivers. This is not ATI or nVidia. This apparently is intel. They're also just about the only vendor providing any useful wifi drivers.

If we actually spend money to sponsor driver development this will be a clear message to all graphics card manufacturers that we will put up with their bad behavior.

With new technology like AIGLX, XGL and XEGL emerging, having open source drivers for 3d cards is very important.

While I agree with this statement, I think this project is the wrong way to go about it, simply because we do finally have a vendor who has committed to open source driver support: Intel. Now, I will grant you that their cards are slow and crappy but they should be up to the task of accelerating the linux desktop. Also, the current release supports only an integrated video chipset and some older cards... but voting with your dollars is an absolute necessity. For any non-gamer, it should be a sufficiently powerful graphics system, and the G965 Express Chipset supports Core 2 Duo and Pentium D, so you can combine it with very good CPU power. If I were building a system today (aka if I could afford to build a system today) this is the combination I would elect to use.

But most importantly, we need to monetarily support vendors who give us working hardware with working linux drivers, or even vendors who simply give us enough information to write drivers. This is not ATI or nVidia. This apparently is intel. They're also just about the only vendor providing any useful wifi drivers.

If we actually spend money to sponsor driver development this will be a clear message to all graphics card manufacturers that we will put up with their bad behavior.

And besides, which 3D accelerated graphics adapter would you suggest that has a GPL-ed driver?

"What Intel graphics cards? I haven't seen any."

There are none for now AFAIK and per their FAQ (see below). Intel released most of their new stuff for their integrated controllers.

That said, I don't see why in the future they might not compete with Nvidia et al. Also, being integrated, I doubt someone could buy these and roll them into a PCI-E card or something but I could be wrong.

Also, I don't recall any recent Intel PCI/AGP/PCI-E product that was released recently, but that's more lack of knowledge on my end given most fanboys care about Nvidia and ATI cards. The simple fact is that most "open source" crazies are hypocrites and buy their Xbox or Playstations and/or run XP so they can get their Counterstrike or WoW fix.

"They have embedded graphics chipsets which rely heavily on the processor,"

I've seen no benchmarks or proof or anecdotal evidence of this. CPU load was somewhat high on integrated graphic chipsets of older cards (i.e. Pentium II and III days), but I've seen nothing regarding their G965 family.

Also, most people don't care if there is some drain on the CPU; the mere fact that there are open source OpenGL compatible drivers is a mighty good thing for their work. I happen to agree; we are in the initial and early stages of hopefully a broader change in how Intel handles their graphics chipsets.

btw, from what I've read on forums and what not, most of those people who want to make the switch to Intel boards also want to run XGL too given the mediocrity of the Nvidia and ATI offerings.

"and come in a single-VGA-only flavor (no DVI unless it's a notebook)."

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html See the comments re the SVDO card (although last I checked these were mainly available in the EU though that may have changed).

"Where is the dual head/Xinerama/Twinview capability?"

No clue. Also unclear is if the dual SVDO card can be used on the single controller and the X desktop stretched across 2 monitors.

"Until then, I'll take Nvidia, even with the proprietary driver blob."

I won't. For "true" open source software systems, I've stayed away from binary drivers for the EXACT reasons others have stated--bugs in the binaries, and the unknown security issues which now have come to fruition. I'd much rather run a somewhat slower system than be rooted.

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

This is one reason I think I'll stop using NVIDIA chips and start using Intel chipset graphics hardware in the future. http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/

but obviously not enough for *BSD

I was dissapointed that this review didn't include any G965 reviews.

If you want the new Linux XGL/AIGLX/Compiz functionality to work out of the box with no binary drivers, a G965 board may very well be what you are looking for.

The G965 chipset includes the new GMA X3000 graphics core, which is the only DX10 feature level graphics solution with FLOSS Linux drivers: http://intellinuxgraphics.org/

The new C2 stepping is rumoured to solve many of the performance problems of the first stepping, and although probably still not suitable for FPS gaming under Linux, other less demanding games and desktop users needs could be well met.