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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."
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.
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.
So now This project is dead?
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 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!
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
Are they making my plans to open source the rest of their graphics drivers ?
The simple fact is that nVidia makes the best consumer-grade graphics cards. ATI's cards might be every bit as powerful as nVidia's, but we'll never know, because ATI can't write a driver a letter, let alone writing a fucking driver.
It's funny, every time I tell this story, people tell me I had shitty hardware in spite of the fact that with an nVidia card in place, the system passes every test I can throw at it, but I had an Athlon XP 2500+ system with a Radeon 9600XT in it. If I installed catalyst control center, the system would bluescreen on every boot; if I didn't, it worked "fine" (some graphics munging that I never had with the admittedly much slower GF4Ti I had in there before.) I recently met someone else who had precisely the same problem as I did. Like me, uninstalling the CCC would make it work fine.
To paraphrase cartman, ATI couldn't write their way out of a nutsack.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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
Well, the first-stage compromise would be this: We have code that runs on the host CPU {which we know intimately}, that not only does stuff in its own right, but also loads code onto the GPU {which we don't know much about}. So treat the GPU as a black box for now we can leave any code that actually runs on the GPU unaltered. Disassemble the bits of the driver that run on the host CPU. Write high-level code that, when compiled, produces bitwise-identical binary code. However, don't copy the GPU code straight into the source {which definitely would require permission from the copyright holder}. Instead, include a little script with your source code that extracts the GPU code portions intact from the binary driver blob, and creates relevant #include files with the GPU code which allow the driver to be built as long as you have a legitimate copy of the non-free driver.
If this violates copyright, then so does listening to the tracks on a CD in a different order to that specified by the record label, or fast-forwarding through boring bits in a video or DVD. These acts evidently are tolerated, since all CD players have the facility to programme in just the tracks you want to hear, and all video and DVD players have a fast-forward button.
For the next stage, we will need to rewrite the source code so as instead of just producing a bitwise-identical binary, it actually works properly. This still isn't perfect {we still don't know what is happening in the GPU} but at least we have abstracted all the proprietary, closed parts out of our CPU.
Reverse-engineering and rewriting the GPU code will be the final challenge.
Your second paragraphs illustrates the thing stopping me from really considering it. However if Intel were to release a separate card they would most likely grab me as a customer. I'm fairly disgruntled about NVidia cards right now, but I was sick of starving myself for the few games on linux that required a spiffy graphics card.
Perhaps there's hope that AMD can open up ATi's drivers, unlikely, but perhaps.