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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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Hopefully AMD/ATI will compete by open-sourcing the drivers for their integrated chipsets. Some healthy competition would definitely help the Linux desktop.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Finally, an honest karma whore.
Yup: http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/
Space for rent, inquire within
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.
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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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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