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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."
Well, this isn't for discrete graphics cards, right - it's for the built-in graphics in the 965 family chipsets. That's my understanding, anyway.
Still, a very nice move.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446 Looks like they're at least considering it.
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.
Not for Linux users.
Given that ATI and nVidia's support for Linux is next to nil, and that their mystery blobs are somewhat error-prone, (not to mention the inherent issues in using a generic binary - link conflicts, non-optimized machine code, etc.), I don't see how choosing an Intel card would be rediculous.
Sure, they're behind, but the 965 series is better than, say, ATI's 8500 (the highest of their cards that is properly supported in Linux). Seems to me that Intel's just jumped ahead of the game by becoming available to a niche market.
Meanwhile, I don't exactly trust the business-motivated hacks found in blobs from graphics card vendors (re: the quake.exe debacle). Having source makes a bechmarking far more auditable.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks - especially those thin and light ones. A choice of video card is rare, especially if one cares about battery life.
Traditionally, Linux support of new notebook video chips was very uncertain, as it is not possible to get a new notebook with a 2 year old graphics controller. Thus the fact that all-Intel notebooks are a safe choice (with not only 2d, but also 3d and wireless working under Linux) is a truly wonderful news.
Also, the new Xserver features have to be implemented on something before there are binary blobs that support them. So having an open code to experiment with, say, Render, impacts other graphics cards as well.
Actually, the 9250 is the fasted fully supported ATI card under Linux. The r300 driver (9600, 9800 and X800) will probably soon be stable enough for widespread use, too. How the 965 compares to those, I don't know. But I suspect it'll be more than good enough for 99% of all users.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Yup: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
Space for rent, inquire within
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!!!
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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Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.
Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards.
"That's a stupid excuse, though. They could always isolate the SGI-laden parts, LGPL the rest, and let the community at least have a fighting chance at replacing what's behind the proprietary API's. I'm not claiming that our homebrew routines would *ever* be better, but I suppose it is within the realm of possibility. Oh, and when I say "always", I do really mean *always*... at any point, even right this minute, they could do so."
They tried that. After a while it Simply Didn't Work - It's not just SGI, and in fact the particular issue that I remember was support for S3 Texture Compression, aka S3TC. For whatever reason, the licensing of S3TC prevented them from ever supporting it in an open-source driver.
ATI started releasing binary-only drivers for Linux shortly after the UT2003 S3TC support fiasco. (In short, UT2K3 would only run on NVidia cards under Linux because they were the only ones that supported S3TC under Linux.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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