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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!
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ?
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)
Of course not -- you can only use the GPU on motherboards that support it, namely those with an Intel chipset. But since the hardware specs and drivers have been released under a free license, you are more than welcome to try to get the GPU to run on any hardware that you can dream of.
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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
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
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
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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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?
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
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
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.
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