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Intel Open Sources Graphics Drivers
PeterBrett writes "Intel's Keith Packard announced earlier today that Intel was open sourcing graphics drivers for their new 965 Express Chipset family graphics controllers. From the announcement: 'Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset
family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics.' The new drivers, available from the Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel website, are licensed under the GPL for Linux kernel drivers, and MIT license for XOrg 2D & 3D rendering subsystems."
If only a company who makes GOOD graphics cards would do the same!
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
This is a great move by Intel - I know which vendor I'll be picking for my next 3D card. I HATE that I only have the choice of Nvidia or ATI's "mystery binary blobs" to play games.
I can't say I particularly care (not using any on-board graphics), but this is a nice move on their part. Also, it would be interesting to see how this affects the performance/features in the long run.
Hopefully AMD/ATI will compete by open-sourcing the drivers for their integrated chipsets. Some healthy competition would definitely help the Linux desktop.
I've noticed an entire industry of low end graphics cards has sprung up to replace the fuzzy pictures from integrated intel graphics.
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will amd/ati take a hint? if not, it seems like intel is going to own the linux market. they already provide good drivers for their wireless cards (i'm using one right now).
Fantastic. Great work Intel. This puts your products in a different, more positive light for me personally. This could be really good for X11. I worked with it for about 10 years and have been very despondent about its chance in a world of proprietary drivers from ATI and NVIDIA being the only way to use modern graphics hardware. Maybe there's a chance for open source desktop after all.
The argument against nVidia and ATI opening up their drivers was always that it would give other vendors a headstart in cloning their chipsets. They'd be able to tell how they work (from a hardware API level at least), and have a driver ready to go if they copied that API.
Now that there's a working Intel 3D driver with source, does this mean that other vendors might start making cheap clones of the Intel graphics chips? Or was the above argument really a red herring.
And if they did, what's to stop them from making chips that use the same API, but work much better?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Nice.
I bet they're trying to preempt AMD doing the same with an integrated ATI chip.
Well played, Intel. Well played.
Victory or awesome!
So now This project is dead?
I'm sure Intel doesn't want to seperate their processors from this, but a discrete card using Intel's 3d would be a quick buy for many linux users. It's a shame I'd have to get a new system to use any newer gpu, but right now the old ati 8500 still works great with open-source drivers. Someone need to nudge Intel into moving their gpu off the chipset.
I think I just cashed out all my cool points.
Well, Intel's integrated graphics chipset is a far cry from the nVidia / ATI high-end accellerators. Cloning it will be next to useless (who'll buy a separate graphics card to replaace an on-board solution?) since most other chipset manufacturers already have on-board solutions of their own. I doubt this will change the high-end makers rationale for keeping their drivers secret.
Ok here is the thing...ATI and nvidia can be a bit of a pain...but on a desktop you buy one or the other and you plug it in and go. Laptops on the other hand your selection is FAR more limited and you have to juggle hardware, and more often than not, something just won't work right or well. This makes the Intel integrated laptops even more attractive now instead of the ATI/nvidia ones. I really hope they go backwards with this to and open their recent chipsets up completely as well.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I'd be willing to bet the REAL reason they don't open their drivers is because they're using stuff they know is the intellectual property of others. Just a guess, though; I have no real information on this, but I'd be very surprised if they can't dig into each other's hardware under a microscope to figure out what the other guy is doing, and reverse engineer each other's drivers. These are some very smart folks we're talking about here.
This chipset has been a source of problems for people running Linux. I predict this move will smooth those problems out in pretty short order, because we can deal with the problem ourselves rather than wait on Intel to allocate the resources to the problem.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
The biggest issue with Intel's GPU versus ATI and NVidia is that it is onboard. The onboard ATI and NVidia GPU's don't really fare any better. The reason is that off-board cards have dedicated memory and buses, meaning that it doesn't have to fight for bus space with the CPU. If Intel made a non-integrated GPU with the same core, it'd do just fine.
I'll also note that the i915 is just fine for running XGL/AIGLX and compiz.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
besides the desire/preference to have open source drivers for license compliance and moral/ethical reasons, there is a more practical reason why source access to drivers is handy. sometimes you need to recompile drivers from source in order to have them play well with operating systems features. for instance, if they need to respect the constraints of real-time systems such as rtlinux, rtai, or xenomai. these systems need to redefine cli/sti (clear/set interrupt) instructions (using macros) so that the real-time micro-kernel handles the interrupts rather than linux. open source drivers let you recompile with #include files that make this possible.
Are you suggesting a company reverse engineer a graphics core based on driver source?
That is pretty much impossible.
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"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
This is good news. Open Source won't fix a bad product (hello Netscape), but you can have an army of eager (unpaid!) geeks happily extending your product. The idiocy of companies that hold their driver source proprietary is beyond belief; Does nVidia and ARI really seriously believe it gives them an advantage? Hardly. nVidia's drivers are buggy and crash prone. I am sick of my nVidia card hanging, and the saps at nVidia's support merely send you an automated email "Have you installed the latest driver." Yes, and it also crashes. If I had the source, I could fire up MSDEV. But I don't.
Intel made an earlier foray into 3D with the i740 which didn't do that well in the marketplace. But now they're back, and this is a nice first step. If they drive nVidia and ATI (and especially nVidia) out of business, I wouldn't shed a tear. Truth is even Microsoft by taking over Shaders with HLSL has done a better job that nVidia with their proprietary Cg language. Open sourcing their drivers shows good faith. Come on Intel!
No. Intel is open sourcing their driver not their entire card. Even so, this project could use open source resources from other sources and get a boost in the arm from something like this. You don't seem to understand how open source works.
Chances are the you are correct. It is not that hard to reverse engineer. And yes, they all have ppl on board doing just that (now a days, they do it out of the country).
As to intellectual propery, I would not be surprised. I know of several large companies that have outright ripped off GPL work. Funny thing is, that the company that I currently works at, has directors that are pushing this while at the same time they sitting on a ethics committe. Sad state.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, tell that to those douchebags at nVidia, it is exactly what that claim is possible...
Would they need to open the existsing drivers?
Surely just releasing API specs would be enough?
I know it's a "why bother?" thing, but with this announcement, perhaps I'll be able to run compiz under Linux, booted off of an exteral drive (I think rEFIt allows for this), at maximum speed. For the time being, I wouldnt want to bother, since last I checked there were no accelerated Intel drivers for Linux.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
It's true that the onboard ATI & nVidia solutions aren't much better than Intel's. I suspect, however, that they share significant API with the high-end non-integreated cards from the same companies which are the real cash cows and therefore the technology they are trying to keep secret.
It won't spawn cheap clones, at this graphics chip already is cheap.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Many, MANY home users out in the field use on-board video for everything. Now, I'm not saying this'll have them all converting to an Open Source OS, but this is yet another advance that would make sending the average noob user over to Linux without any sort of performance hit.
Taking a 180 degree turn and looking right back at your interpretation of the story, I find it very likely that Intel will be teaming up with nVidia sometime soon. Now that AMD owns ATI, Intel should be wide open to purchase nVidia if they want, and (although I'm not saying they'll need it), pairing Intel's massive resources with nVidia's enthusiast motherboard chipsets and universal video options, things could improve rapidly for the both of them. However, if Intel is going to enter the market as a third video force, that seems unlikely, although we could see Intel graphics cards interfacing well only with intel boards and intel CPUS, and the customer could likely lose if such a situation becomes possible.
Anyway, I think I've speculated enough. The bottom line is that open-sourcing these drivers is a very interesting and likely harmless move for intel to make, and it should make the jobs of many OS coders easier in the open source OS circles.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
They also may be using intellectual property from outside entities under license that they are not allowed to reveal. I know that this is the number one issue keeping many legacy applications from being open sourced.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What incredibly sensible move by Intel and what a great way to differentiate themselves from the competition.
I hope this puts pressure on nVidia and AMD/ATI to follow suit. Although they probably don't want each other seeing how many of their respective patents have been violated or that their code is full of benchmark-enhancing hacks.
I know that all of us techies turn our noses up at integrated graphic chipsets, but I think that an enormous number of computers out there, including laptops, that utilize this technology. One of the more common complaints from people switching to linux is that the monitor resolution and graphics are sucky. A BSD and GPL licenced driver solution would be perfect to help more people make the switch!
Are they making my plans to open source the rest of their graphics drivers ?
The best thing since sliced bread!
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Laptop chipsets with Intel's integrated graphics cost $3 or $4 more than otherwise equivalent chipsets without graphics as of July according to their price list.
Good luck getting cheaper than that with your knock-off.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Yes, But does it run on Linux?
Remember ... to use this GPU [totally unrelated to the CPU] you *MUST* use an Intel processor.
So before y'all get too far ahead patting Intel on the back remember that you are not free to use the GPU with say an ARM, MIPS, PPC or other x86 processor [via/amd/etc]. Not only that, but IIRC Intel GPUs are tied to Intel chipset motherboards.
So while it's all good and said that the drivers are open source, that helps users, it doesn't help the industry and society as a whole. Making their GPUs independently available outside of their x86 processor line would [e.g. as a discrete chip others could license or as an add-on PCI-E card].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Can somebody please explain this dual licensing scheme. Why do they even have the GPL in there? If you can obtain the source code under the MIT license, can't you do whatever you want with it, including dropping it in a GPL project?
This would influence my buying decision as well.
...nuclear stations, oil refineries, subway systems, military... These businesses want their IT to last as long as the machinery it controls does (decades).
There are many businesses that require long product life cycles that only open source can provide. If I buy a brand X hardware, who is to say it will work with next year's version of Windows? Who will say the company still supports the product?
There are many long life-cycle assets out there: heavy industry is an obvious example.
It is also a pain to buy a computer and get 95% of it working under Linux. Even major vendors like HP don't really tell you what works and what doesn't. The same can be said for Windows, because shipped drivers are usually terrible, but at least you can get new ones from the web site.
Why nVidia or ATI should bother? The Linux gaming sector is plain dead when compared to its Windows counterpart, back since the days of Loki's demise; there is no need for most Linux users to purchase expensive modern video cards unless game developers all of a sudden target their mainstream production to Linux. On the other hand, there is a tendency to beautify the plain old desktop with all the fancy things around - Vista's Aero, Novell's xgl - and to make use of all this stuff one needs at least basic 3d acceleration. So here's where VIA/S3 might join Intel with their S25 thing, because it's S25 that targets this same market of eye candy desktop. And since S25 is a stripped down version of S27, afaik, that's the power video card I expect to become Linux friendly in the near future, not any of those Radeons or GeForces.
Finally, an honest karma whore.
Hardly.
Closed-source Linux drivers can work well enough for a single kernel version in a controlled environment. You still don't get support from most distros that would want to build their own. Sure, if you cooperate you get in Novell and Red Hat's offerings, but not much further. You also get the onus of sinking the money into it to keep it working. Not to mention you pretty much guarantee being a problem to your users--think things like software suspend that never work right with closed drivers because certain problems can't be debugged or fixed (in which case improved quality *IS* a foregone conclusion).
You either get SLES / RHEL, or you get SLES / RHEL / Debian / Ubuntu / everything else... Not to mention improved operation. Of course, gravitating toward what works is why people are using open source in the first place. Sometimes "what works" is defined in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in and extortionate licensing.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
I'm wandering if apple's adoption of intel had anything to do with that..
this coupled with apple's opening of their kernel source for osX86 has made the horizon of computing seem a bit less bleak than before.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I will definitely buy one of these motherboards now. The best solution right now is the ATI R200 series (Radeon 9250) cards. My R200 will hopefully last me until I can get one of these Intel chips. Maybe with a quad Kentsfield.
Ultimate. Linux. Workstation.
I know this isn't the right place to ask. But is the 965 available for the older yonah chip? Or the new merom on up?
I'm just trying ot figure out if Apple could update the GPU in the Macbooks and stick with the yonah to still differentiate the Macbooks from the Macbook Pros/
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
Because it was a one-liner lacking any depth... yet had been modded up.
Thus, overrated.
It's about time made a serious effort, and this is a nice little gesture that isn't going to hurt them. I think it would be great if GPUs were, if not fully open, documented at the hardware level to the same degree that Intel CPUs are. ATI and NVIDIA give you nothing on the actual hardware, and only expose functionality through DirectX, OpenGL, and a few OpenGL extensions if you are lucky.
I've also heard in various places that Intel could be the first to release DX10 capable hardware. "programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders" sounds like DX10 to me.
You are correct. The current nv and radeon projects would be greatly aided by official documentation from nVidia and ATI. I believe they have requested such information and those companies have refused to provide it.
Centralization breaks the internet.
. . . but I'd be very surprised if they can't dig into each other's hardware under a microscope to figure out what the other guy is doing, and reverse engineer each other's drivers.
What on earth would they do that for? What could they even do with said drivers? Nobody cares about the silly drivers, it's the chip they're interested in in the first place.
The fear is that by looking at the driver code they can figure out the architecture of the chip by looking at what's going on at a high level, without having to look at the chip under a microscope and try to figure out what the hell a godzillion apparently random transistors are doing.
KFG
If any of you are reading this, my current graphics card is a Nvidia, but the next I hope will be a 965, just because of this.
Thank you.
You could still have dedicated GPU memory onboard, the only difference it makes is that it gives you the ability to build an architecture that isn't PCI, AGP, PCI-X, etc. Most game consoles do something similar. The Xbox GPU was competitive when it came out, without even having any dedicated memory, and while sharing a bus with the CPU.
Bullshit. It was one-liner that said everything. You don't need to write a freaking novel to say something meaningful.
n/t
Do you own an ATI graphics card? Have you ever had to deal with fglrx? It doesn't play nice with radeonfb (for framebuffer console). It doesn't play nice with suspend2 (for hibernate/sleep). That simply would not happen with a driver in the kernel tree. (I cannot speak for the nVidia drivers as I have not had as much experience with them.)
In my experience, open source drivers Just Work(tm).
Centralization breaks the internet.
Second, Thank You Intel, so very much.... BECAUSE Even the laziest of our part-time hobbyist programmers will be able to improve your driver performance.
All these years I just refused to believe Intel could develop and ship newer and newer Card/integrated Video chips that were lightyears behind in performance and features. I instead chose to think of them as a Hardware Company full of Hardware Engineers who look down on the few "soft ones". I can understand how that might develop there.
I believed, some day, they would come around, and hire some PC Software/Driver Engineers. Someday the driver would rescue their possibly brilliant designs.
Well this is even better. We get our open graphics card with every e-machine.
Except, Of course Intel doesn't pay for it and yet reaps the rewards, and naturally perpetuates the undervalued view of us software guys.
Vicous cycle.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Next step: getting NVIDIA and ATI to comply with the law.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Intel can afford to do this, as its graphics systems are not state of the art, and it does not need to fear competitors stealing trade secrets. This probably is counter move by Intel to face AMD/ATI. This improves the state of art for open-source graphics drivers(licenses permitting). As somebody who needs cheap, no-nonsense, non-gaming, decent graphics on linux workstations, I cant wait to get one of their motherboards with graphics builtin.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
I didn't say they DO that, but that they CAN do that. I'm sure they're perfectly capable of reverse engineering the drivers without having to look at the chip under a microscope. I just don't think that the reason they don't open source their drivers has anything to do with the competition figuring out how they do things. Both camps are extremely competent, and probably have little need to bother stealing from each other in that regard. I just think they don't own all the IP in either their drivers, and/or in their hardware, (licensed or not).
Implementing other companies intellectual property, licenced or not, would certainly explain why they would hide the code. But they may also simply be afraid to use patented technology without knowing it, or to become easier targets for undue litigation in this field. Hiding the code somehow protect them from being sued. Another kind of "security by obscurity", legal style?
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
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Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.
Eye candy sells. It sells Mac's and in eleven years it will sell Vista. Intel is betting in the near term that some enterprising OEM will want to distribute linux with compiz running. After watching Kororaa Linux get raked over the coals for including non gpl binary drivers it makes perfect sense for them. I agree with the other posts that Intel graphics are not exactly high end but what it may become is supported by default in most major distributions. This is a really good thing. I for one (am not welcoming any new overlords) really welcome accelerated graphics with a vanilla install.
load "$",8,1
You do know that Keith Packard is one of the main guys working on Xfree86, and Xorg since, right? I think he knows a thing or two about graphics drivers.
The i855gm/915 has a docbook almost 500 pages in length with all the specs for the chip. If you go to intel's page for drivers you'll see that their drivers are created by Tungsten. If you run the most recent xorg, xf86-intel-video drivers from freedesktop (prior to this announcement), and mesa you'll have almost fully working DRI. This announcement is just to show that the OSS drivers now support the new 965 chipset. Nothing new here move along!!!
So my question is this - does Intel also fully disclose the full specifications and internal workings of their chipset? My guess is no. Most likely, the drivers will be developed by Intel employees with access to internal documents. Those drivers could then be debugged and possibly optimized by the community but the community will still be locked out of development.
Willy
Erm... I doubt it.
For the past few years, off and on, I've been porting the XFree/Xorg Intel 8xx graphics drivers to BeOS, so I have a fairly close relationship with that code, and unusually detailed knowledge of the chip series. Unless this represents a completely different codebase (which I doubt), it's really not that bad. Unless you're planning on turning it into a full kernel-mode driver, taking advantage of native interrupts and so forth, there's not a lot that could be improved.
The most annoying part with this driver release is that it still needs the BIOS to set display modes. BeOS can't access/execute the BIOS, so the driver has to be full native. I'll probably still have to do some fairly icky things to make it work...
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Are you talking about Xorg's 'nv' driver? AFIAK that's maintained by an employee of NVIDIA.
You know, there's a lot more to do with a computer than play games. Especially amongst those of us that run Linux, we tend to do a lot less gameplaying than the average bear.
Personally, I'm ecstatic over FINALLY being able to purchase a system that will run Google Earth, that I won't have to fuck with every time a kernel update happens, or ATI breaks their latest blob and I have to spend hours googling for a fix, or nvidia hasn't once again broken something because they don't think anyone but 10 users still use this graphics card.
There's *nothing* but good to be said about open source graphics card drivers that support halfway decent OpenGL. Even if I don't have the privledge of spending $500 upgrading my rig just to play whatever the flavour of the month PC game is out.
If Intel would do this for add-on cards and not just integrated chipsets (which is what I hear is the deal so far), I'd be as happy as I've been ever since discovering Linux.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The stuff they're particularly trying to protect is stuff that is specifically not legally protected intellectual property. They've chosen the "secret formula" route. Protected intellectual property (the only kind you need a license to use) is public knowledge.
And their secrets only need to be protected for a few years, the rate at which it becomes obsolescent, which is faster than reverse engineering time; and much shorter than patent protection time.
I'm sure they're perfectly capable of reverse engineering the drivers without having to look at the chip under a microscope.
And that is why Linux has no driver issues.
I've been known to make some custom hardware. If you give me driver code I can make you a chip that will run it; perfectly. If you give me a chip and a binary driver I can make the chip do something with my own code, but I'll never figure out everything it can do without the specs. Never, ever. No matter how bright I am.
KFG
Dude, you are shattering my illusion. You mean this is the best we can get? No I don't believe it. Intel makes good hardware. right, right. I mean Intel chips cost more, they must be better, right, right.
Unless you're planning on turning it into a full kernel-mode driver, taking advantage of native interrupts and so forth, there's not a lot that could be improved.
Me, I'm planing on never using Intel Integrated Graphics unless forced by Court Order, or Another Emachine or Hp box showing up on another monday morning, I hate it when he does that.. Let alone hack the code for it. No I prefer AMD and Nvidia but I'll swith to AMD/AMD if they open up too. Unless Nvidia wants to go first and be second/ Come on guys, make every linux user/gamer happy.
BTW... I was talking about Driver performance/stability under windows. Actually running Linux, I usually have very little problems other than maybe .... the slowest fscking hardware opengl I've ever seen on a 3ghz Machine. (I know you are thinking, Who cares though, its a Workstation. Yeah a workstation forever without xgl, TODO:insert sad face icon.)
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
I am quite certain this is not the case. In fact, my opinion is that there is no good reason to withhold the specs and the only business reason is if some entity stipulated this as part of the contract.
The reason is that hardware interface is usually very close to what DirectX exposes, with fairly minimal translation.
What one needs for driver development is usually not the explanation of how card works (which is often public), but the knowledge that a particular DirectX field is accessed through register X or that memory controller is configured by writing certain values in some registers.
There is truly nothing very special (as far as "intellectual" property is concerned) about how one configures the DAC or video PLL.
Even for more advanced things like pixel or vertex shaders the bulk of the architecture is usually explained in documentation and all that one needs is to know how the elementary operations the card supports are packed into C structure.
This seems like a good on-topic thread in which to mention the freedesktop.org (X.org folks) effort to write a 100% open source 3D driver for the NVidia cards -- nouveau
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
If you're an owner of an nVidia card, please do all you can to help contribute! They appear to be suprisingly far along.
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This is a good move by Intel especially now that AMD has bought ATI. Now that CPUs have been comoditized, the next thing to do is to comoditize the graphics parts. Granted this is only an integrated solution, but who knows, Intel might want to restart the discrete graphics parts. I mean Intel has the means and the resources to create discrete parts if Intel could make money off it.
Intel has been providing full docs for their integrated graphics for years now. That's why you get full hardware accelerated 3d out of the box on these machines, and that's why we buy them instead of more affordable amd based machines for our linux developers' workstations.
Now, I'm in the market for a laptop this fall. Which one on the market are built using this GPU ? I have a soft spot for Thinkpad, but I am willing to try another brand if Linux support (including wifi) and battery life are good.
Where's the zealotry???
;-)
Why didn't Intel open their hardware specs for this chip too???? C'mon people, why is there no complaining? I'm beginning to think I'm reading some moderate site
This would BE the latest. We've just been given a driver that can drive their GMA X3000 integrated GPU.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yes. We don't need them to open source their drivers. We just need them to release docs in order for the community to write drivers.
No. More like a large portion of the design resides in the driver. Its much cheaper to design the hardware at its best once and then cripple part of it for the middle and lower range. It would not make good business sense if the manufaturer is going to openly tell customers how to access features they did not pay for. There are other issues as well, such as the potential liability from using patented code/circuits is always greater then the profits realized.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
I don't know that statements about "unified graphics API" and "_in kernel_ interfaces" are necessarily the same thing. There are a lot of reasonable arguements that would support a "unified graphics API", independant of the linked article's contention that the optimal system (for Linux) is to have "drivers" as part of the main kernal tree.
I was bummed my laptop had an Intel graphics card in it. (because they are not very fast). But if I get good 2d and 3d support in X11 on it, that is nice. And I think the real bonus of open source drivers is that some of the alternative OSes will pick up the changes (like Plan 9). OpenGL working on Plan 9 would be nice indeed.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Try a 1600x1200 LCD from Dell, hooked up via a DVI-D (purely digital) connection.
You get 1280x960, scaled to fill the screen. This is because the BIOS sets the flatpanel size wrong and the nv driver does not have the ability to reprogram it.
On a 1920x1280 display (Dell, DVI-D, NVidia) you get something dreadful, around 720x400 if I remember right.
Chances are they have licensed things in their silicon implementation that they are forbidden to release documentation for.
You seem to have forgotten that ATI cards were fully documented until about 2002-2003 or so, when they started licensing technologies from other companies that were forbidding them from releasing documentation or open-source drivers for said technologies.
The Unreal Tournament 2003/S3 Texture Compression fiasco showed that not licensing such technologies would be commercial suicide. ATI started releasing closed-source drivers shortly after that incident, and initially the main difference was S3TC support.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Or, more specifically, providing such documentation is forbidden by companies they license crucial technologies from.
Companies have one of two choices in such situations:
1) License the technologies, and only release incomplete documentation not covering those technologies. (ATI, NVidia's approach)
2) Don't use such technologies, allowing the release of complete documentation but crippling the chipset. (Intel's approach).
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Intel has had the previous versions of there graphics chipsets under an open source license for quite some time now. From the comments I've read, people seem to think this is a new behavior from Intel...
Open source drivers are an especially good thing when it comes to making Linux easy. I know that the difference between installing Suse 9.3 (no Intel drivers) and Suse 10 (Intel drivers in the kernel) on my cheap Dell Inspiron 1200 was phenomenal.
On my gaming rig I do have an nVidia card, and I can't really complain since I haven't had any trouble with their drivers. It certainly would be nice to see full 3D rendering out-of-the-box, though if nVidia ever GPLed their code...
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446
ati^h^h^h AMD is sort of doing this too.
I have a nice nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra in my system that I paid a pretty hefty penny for which I cannot use for doing any sort of 3D under Linux because nVidia hasn't released binary blobs for my system. Why? Because it's a PowerPC based Macintosh.
If the current x86 drivers were open source then there would at least be a chance that get PPC drivers. As for now, I am at the whim of nVidia and they don't seem to be in that big of a hurry.
Register addresses are not valuable to competitors. They are ONLY valuable to driver developers. Nvidia doesn't release specs not for a real reason like you think, but because their horde of lawyers understands less than nothing, and simply maintains the "keep everything secret because it could be worth something, we're too dumb to know". Unfortunately, the legal team makes these decisions, not the engineers.
Making drivers open is always a step in the right direction, and wil help tons of people running integrated graphics cards on their linux laptops. Now all Intel needs to do is start producing a line of workstation cards.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
All the comments so far suggest that a separate graphics card (with its own memory and "memory bus") is only important for gaming. In my experience, that is not true. Integrated graphics are an issue on any system where memory access is a bottleneck. Of course, many modern systems have way more power than is needed for the modest applications run on them. For systems that need an upgrade, however, a low end graphics card to eliminate the memory contention caused by the integrated graphics is often the first step.
Don't forget that _lots_ of people use Linux to get work done... and a whole crapload of that work is graphical in nature (including CAD and 3D rendering).
At my job we all have huge dual-processor Xeons running the absolute fastest videocards we can get our hands on (which right now are some variant of Nvidia Quadro cards)... and not a single one is using windows.
Now why aren't we running ATi cards? well... because their linux drivers suck.
So what's the incentive for writing good drivers for linux? Oh yeah... because a lot of people will use them... even if they're not gaming.
Friedmud
Laptops? Desktops? Servers?
My next computer will be one of those.
I apologize. I did not know that. But if that is the case, then why does it not support 3D acceleration?
Centralization breaks the internet.
And those are some of the same reasons why ATI and nVidia do not open source their drivers, so asking for just the docs is not much different.
Centralization breaks the internet.
There are two reasons to rejoice.
Keith Packard seems to be the driving force behind graphics on Linux (x.org) and related innovation.
Thank you Keith Packard. Thank you Intel for hiring him. Thank you Intel for opening your driver.
Now I know my next system will have a vendor support open source driver. Finally!
No, it's very much alive. Just before I posted this story, I sent a similar e-mail to the list. BTW, there's currently a call going out for people to work on the OpenGraphics drivers.
However, I do worry that should Intel decide to put their graphics chip on a discrete PCI card it would eat up much of our potential market...
Pirate Party UK
Ever notice how stories show up there way before they are on slashdot?
You know, sometimes having the source code of some device driver doesn't help too much.. They should have released the technical datasheet too...
Just calculate how many good old BIOS interrupt 10 calls the 2D X driver does, yes, the ones used in good old DOS-age.
(For dummies, use "xf86ExecX86int10" for keyword to grep)
How would we do without the BIOS.
Conclusion would be:
- Yes, have to use legacy BIOS support in the new machines with no BIOS installed by default to get any acceleration (this is called Boot Camp in Macbook)
So to the wishlist, get rid of the BIOS (VESA,ACPI,etc.) calls on the X server.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have an old Athlon 900MHz with 768 Megs of RAM. This config is more than enough for me to run the latest Debian Sid IMHO. Except for graphics performances. There is a GeForce2 in this box, and I can't use proprietary nvidia driver with the latest kernel (as more recent version of the nvidia driver does not support my geforce 2 anymore). That's why I have to use nv. But that sucks a bit. No 3D acceleration (so no quake 3, ...), and 2D performances are way inferior to closed nvidia driver.
:)
If there are open drivers for an intel graphics accelerator that is rather cheap and at least as fast as my more-than-five-year-old geforce 2, I'll buy for sure
Possibly.
Another reason why they are unwilling to release the information might be because it would prove that they have been bullshitting us for a long time.
Chances are that the difference between a £50 card and a £300 card is in the software: by changing just one bit in one byte in the huge, bloated blob of a driver, you could extract £300 performance from a £50 graphics card. It can't be economically viable for them to fabricate different GPUs to use on "cheap" and "expensive" cards. Instead, they have an I/O pin {maybe several pins?} on the GPU which they tie to 0V {so it reads as a 0} on the cheap cards, or leave unconnected {so it looks like a 1} on the expensive cards. The driver software reads the state of the pin and determines whether or not to run the card in "expensive" mode.
{Then, of course, there are the various "cheats" built into games to make them run faster or better with certain graphics cards -- or, to put it more accurately, to make them run slower or worse with other graphics cards. Games companies are certainly not above accepting bakshish.}
The RAW formats used by digital cameras are similarly undocumented for pretty much the same reason: the JPEG files are interpolated up to much higher resolutions than the sensor actually generates. Revealing the format of the RAW file would also reveal the real number of pixels on the image sensor, and likely open up camera manufacturers to prosecution under consumer protection law.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
NVIDIA don't want the 'open source' driver to be too good. They prefer us to continue to suckle at the teat of their proprietary offering.
Besides, they are only technically open source. The 'nv' driver is basically undocumented and pretty much unmaintainable by anyone other than an NVIDIA employee.
The original 8500 is a faster card than the newest 9250. And 9200 was a bit faster than 9250.
Markets are not geared towards snobs...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Dude, that's just, um, plain BS.
It is pretty well known what is on the cards and what the hardware can do. If you buy the 300 buck version, you're getting a piece of hardware that is guaranteed to deliver the bang of the 300 buck version. If you're buying the 150 buck version, you're getting guaranteed 150 buck performance - however, you may twiddle with the card in various ways (raising core/memory frequencies and activating additional pipelines) and maybe get lucky and have the thing run as a 300 buck version. The instances in which this works are pretty well known (most famous example: Radeon 9500 to Radeon 9700 pro mod) and have absofrickinlutely nothing to do with closed-source drivers. The nasty secret conspiracy you're painting on the wall here is neither secret nor a conspiracy, but just standard business practice.
Howevery, oddly enough, both NV and Ati ceased having OS drivers around the time their chips got put into Microsoft game consoles. Coincidence ?
If you make your "second best" products by starting with your "best" products and then doing something to them which makes them less desirable so you can sell them for a lower price, you are effectively using labour to subtract value. The implication is that if you hadn't done the downgrading work {which must cost some money}, you could actually afford to sell the "best" product at a cheaper price than the "second best" product.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Chances are that the difference between a £50 card and a £300 card is in the software: by changing just one bit in one byte in the huge, bloated blob of a driver, you could extract £300 performance from a £50 graphics card. It can't be economically viable for them to fabricate different GPUs to use on "cheap" and "expensive" cards. Instead, they have an I/O pin {maybe several pins?} on the GPU which they tie to 0V {so it reads as a 0} on the cheap cards, or leave unconnected {so it looks like a 1} on the expensive cards. The driver software reads the state of the pin and determines whether or not to run the card in "expensive" mode.
This is pretty common practice and it's not dishonest or deceptive. Intel and AMD have been doing this with their processors for years. When you manufacture a bunch of chips, a certain percentage of them are always faulty. Some of the faulty ones have to be thrown out, but some of them will actually work at a slower clock speed, or with certain features disabled. So why not just sell these parially faulty chips at a reduced price?
I think you didn't understand that yet.
The "best" product has been verified to work 100% correctly as the "best" product.
The "second best" product wasn't up to the specs of the "best" product, but isn't bad enough to be thrown away. Maybe not all of the pixel pipelines worked 100%, maybe its power consumption is too high at the frequencies of the "best" product, etc. Some of these specs might be irrelevant to the customer, that's why he might try and run the thing at the "best" specs.
And then there's the issue of having cheaper components on the card to produce a cheaper version. Even if the same GPU is used, it will run slower if paired with slower (cheaper) memory and/or a narrower (cheaper) memory bus. Or the GPU can only be clocked more slowly if paired with a slower (cheaper) cooling solution.
The implication is that if you hadn't done the downgrading work {which must cost some money}
The "downgrading" work actually consists of testing if the chip actually works, and under which conditions it will work reliably. So just skip that part and solder it in anyway ?
Intel is scared and they are just doing this as an attempt to try to gain more consumer support of their graphics junk. Unfortunately this won't save them.
for this chipset to be incorporated into an AMD based mobo!
Just wanted to give you pat on the back for helping to keep BeOS/Haiku alive. Live long and prosper, dude!
Bitsofnews.com Giving you the latest bits
ATI posting net income of $41M and nVidia $302.5M, yet you state ATI has higher net income? Something is missing here.. Anyway, Intel will unlikely buy nVidia, since it has no need, Intel has lots of inhouse knowledge and patents covering graphics industry, and while they don't create high-end graphics cards, their integrated graphics certainly aren't "crap". Instead, their performance/watt & performance/transistor is the best in the industry. They do know how to do stuff, yet aren't interested in high-end graphics. And with market-lead in GPUs, they've done something right.. As to buying nVidia, it wouldn't be allowed, even if they wanted. That would create too big monopoly in GPU markets if two biggest would merge. Not gonna happen. And everyone can see from numbers that Intel could buy AMD if they wanted, but that's not going to happen either, so speculating something based on "they could if they wanted" is pretty ..uninteresting.
>That's only true if you use popular hardware.
In my experience, it's even *more* important when using less popular hardware.
>In the real world, all the smart users have vendor support to take care of >this issue for them. As linux popularity grows, the number of people using >a non-vendor kernel shrinks. A tiny minority of linux boxes run Linus' >tree.
Oh please. Smart users have nothing to do with it at all. Vendor support for drivers is generally poor, especially for older, no-longer-in-production hardware. They simply don't care about it anymore. You get told that the new hardware will fix it.
What everyone who complains about at/nvidia not opening the source for the drivers is not thinking about for some reason... For example...if nvidia made their drivers open source, don't you think ATI would have a field day with those? while it may be a good thing for all of us using the cards/drivers, it may be a bad thing for the company(s) to do, it would be like handing all of your trade secrets over to your enemy.
Yeah, why spend the money to develop your own drivers when there is a massive pools of free labor out there that WANTS to work, for free, to do it for you?! BRILLIANT! (in my best Orbit chewing gum girl voice)
It's ironic that you say that in a conversation about graphics drivers... Especially in a conversation about graphics drivers from the only manyfacturer who's drivers are now open source, but aren't backwards compatable. Say what you will about ATI or nvidia drivers, but you load them up and they still run the old chips.
And old hardware support from open source drivers is great if the device was popular when it was still in production. Otherwise, you're lucky if you can get it to work at all. Sure, there is a reasonable chance that the driver will compile (though even that hasn't always been the case)...
Also, when I said vendor, I meant linux vendor, not device vendor. Over the long term, the majority of users are ones that run a supported distribution on hardware supported by their distribution vendor, either because they built their box to the distro's specs (most businesses), or because they bought the hardware with the OS bundled (most home users).
This conversation is only really interesting at all to people with obscure hardware, or people who roll their own kernel and system.
I don't think they are giong to open up their drivers because of DRM. Macrovision, HDTV all rely upon the drivers. If the source is available, the next thing is to remove DRM
Also included in the more recent kernels, BTW:
Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 Network Connection Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG Network Connection
#
# Wireless 802.11b ISA/PCI cards support
#
CONFIG_IPW2100=m
CONFIG_IPW2200=m
Thank you so much for pointing this out! Every time I read about video drivers on Slashdot, the discussion seems to consist of a bunch of people screaming, "OMFG DA GAMEZ!!1!" I run Linux pretty much everywhere, I use my computers for all sorts of fun geeking-around as well as serious work, but I don't play games - not anything beyond the occasional stupid Flash game on the web or something, anyway. I really, really don't care if my video cards have kick-ass 3D or not. Yes, I'd like to be able to run Google Earth, but until they released a version that ran on Linux a few weeks back, I didn't have any use for 3D acceleration. I just wanted a simple video card with stable drivers and good enough 2D support for video playback. My main desktop machine at home is still running on my circa-2000 Matrox G400 Dual Head for this reason (although even that involves a stupid hack to get the dual head working). I'd so love to be able to get a more modern video card that supported my LCD monitors with their DVI capabilities, but I've been afraid to because everything these days is from nVidia or ATI and I keep hearing nightmare stories about instability and craptastic support.
I cannot get over the fact that so many people are so obsessed with video games, as if that were some absolutely essential aspect of computing. I realize there's a hardcore enthusiast niche, sure, but it seems much broader than that. A lot of people even stick with Windoze because they can't give up their games. Do people these days really have nothing better to do than shell out metric fucktons of money for the next flashy digital distraction?? Christ-on-crutch!
"ATI posting net income of $41M and nVidia $302.5M, yet you state ATI has higher net income?"
Good catch - I read the 41.____ M as 4.1_____ billion from the line above.
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