The "Bloody Mess" That Is Intel's Poulsbo Driver

AdamWill writes "Phoronix writes about the mess that is the Linux support situation for Intel's new graphics chipset, the GMA 500 — aka Poulsbo. Near the end they refer to my own post on the topic ('Okay, so after a whole day spent bashing around at this crap, I can very confidently and conclusively say, it's utterly broken'). Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies, but if they can't sort out the mess surrounding the driver for this chipset — which is already used on the Dell Mini 12 and Sony Vaio P, and will be used on many future Intel-based systems — that reputation will take a serious hit."

Comments

Bloody Mess

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be that time of the month for intel....

Re:Bloody Mess

[awrz]

Oh wait. Read that wrong. I thought that gave them +5% damage and gory dismemberment when an enemy is killed in VATS.

My bad.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

It must be that time of the month for intel....

Crap like this is what will drive companies _away_ from open source. Look at all the flak that Sun gets regarding it's handling of Open Office. Or countless other examples. The community should be grateful that these companies support FOSS at all, instead, it looks like any company that comes to the FOSS table will be eaten when it doesn't do this right, or doesn't do things 'in the spirit' or takes their time with something.

Re:Bloody Mess

[budgenator]

But with enough goading their code will come up to FOSS standards, and if they can pull their heads out into the sunshine it would even help their proprietary work.

Re:Bloody Mess

[Hal_Porter]

Her name was Poulsbo. She lived in the kernel tree.

Re:Bloody Mess

[timeOday]

Crap like this is what will drive companies _away_ from open source. Look at all the flak that Sun gets regarding it's handling of Open Office. Or countless other examples. The community should be grateful that these companies support FOSS at all

No, this is not OpenOffice, because drivers are only useful to customers who pay for hardware. When I shop for a laptop, I buy something with good driver support by my chosen OS, which is Linux. So if Intel wants me to consider buying something with their chips, they'd better fix the driver problem. The idea of being "grateful" to somebody making something I might want to buy is neither here nor there.

Re:Bloody Mess

[FireFury03]

Crap like this is what will drive companies _away_ from open source.

Why? If I buy some hardware I expect it to work properly no matter what operating system I'm running (so long as that OS has drivers). It doesn't matter whether you're supporting Windows, Linux, OS X, or whatever - if you release drivers for your hardware and they don't work then you're (quite rightly) going to get flak - people have paid for some hardware which doesn't work as expected.

Or are you saying that companies will also be driven away from supporting Windows because people complain their crappy software doesn't work there (a pretty frequent occurrence)?

The community should be grateful that these companies support FOSS at all

How about the companies being grateful that we're buying their hardware at all?

These days I buy Intel graphics hardware because it generally _does_ work out of the box with Free drivers. The same can not be said about the likes of nVidia. Same goes for 802.11 hardware. Intel seems to be having problems with this driver, but I'm pretty confident that they are working on fixing the problem because they do seem to understand that they don't have some god given right to expect customers to buy their hardware no matter how badly supported it is.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

That's when you take your money and buy elsewhere (and optionally, write to both companies and let them know whey you choose their/competitors product). Interestingly, lately that means that I've been buying ATI video.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

That's not what they want. Code quality is not the goal: money is.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

No, actually, Windows users don't complain. That is one of the reasons that companies love to serve them crap. It's us picky Linux users who are the pains in their ass wanting quality code.

Re:Bloody Mess

[walt-sjc]

Partially true.

Case in point - the buggy graphics driver for my 3 year old laptop (which was top of the line at the time, 1920x1200 display and all) hasn't been updated since the laptop was released. Unfortunately the generic ATI driver for it refuses to install and am at the mercy of the laptop vendor who isn't interested in updating it. I'm just fucked on Windows. I'm one voice. They already have their money from me, and could care less.

This laptop is still very very serviceable - everything (except for the buggy video drivers) works fine and it is plenty fast - I can't see replacing it for another couple years unless it breaks.

What this is a call for is for laptop vendors and graphics chip companies to really get their shit together and stop doing "special" shit for ONE model of laptop for example. I SHOULD be able to use the generic (and still maintained) driver.

In the case of the FA and Linux, the issue is that this "open source" driver really isn't as it has these binary blobs in them that make it impossible for the community to take things in their own hands and fix it. It's a VERY simple problem that "may" be impossible to fix because Intel probably licensed some proprietary patented software / technologies that are in those blobs. That puts the core of the driver still in a closed source jail.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

I don't know about Intel, but I am certain that such practices occur. Lexmark *cough*

Re:Bloody Mess

[jowaju]

You should try the Omega ATI Drivers, they work with almost any notebook ATI card out there.

Re:Bloody Mess

[rtb61]

Technically it is much harder for windows users to complain ie. was it the hardware, was it a driver, was it the application you were using, was it some background dll, was it the power supply. It can be really hard to tell, especially when the company that supplies the OS routinely lies about it's failures and won't disclose all the discovered and unpatched faults in it's software.

When using open source software the ability to track down the fault and chastise the offender is a whole lot easier, so it happens far more often.

Re:Bloody Mess

[Profane MuthaFucka]

I say fukk'em. Companies don't do anything out of the good of their hearts. They do things because they make money. Sun would endure a million people shouting "cunt" at them every day if they thought they could make money. And they'd ignore a million people sending candies and flowers every day if they would lose money.

So if Intel is going to get out of OSS because people are irritated and express it, then Intel will die from their own stupidity.

Re:Bloody Mess

[the_womble]

They are not charities, they are supporting open source because they expect to directly or indirectly (selling licensed versions, selling support, selling more hardware, etc.) profit from it.

They cannot expect to do that if users are not happy with it. If they want to profit from us, they need to listed to complaints.

Re:Bloody Mess

[dotancohen]

By all means, offer them constructive criticism. But don't attack them. "Bloody mess"? If someone called the Linux kernel a bloody mess on LKML do you think that his criticism would be heard?

Re:Bloody Mess

[AdamWill]

No X.org developer called anything a bloody mess. I used some choice terms (and I actually *edited* my post shortly after making it...), but I'm not an X.org developer. Phoronix introduced the 'bloody mess' term specifically, and they're not X.org developers either.

Reputation?

[clang_jangle]

I thought the intel video chipset reputation was already something like "it sucks, ATI or nvidia are much better choices".

Re:Reputation?

[lbbros]

Actually they are fine (I can even run a composited desktop on my EeePC, and that's a GMA 900), but in this case the technology isn't theirs, it was acquired from some third-party.

Re:Reputation?

[Pinky's Brain]

Really though, you'd think Intel would negotiate an IP license which would allow them to release good drivers. It seems IMG should be getting ready to release some sort of Linux drivers around this time though ... perhaps this will address the GMA500 situation too?

http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard/browse_thread/thread/ec1427fdb8f9ef8d/14af5abb79383525?lnk=gst&q=POWERVR#14af5abb79383525

Re:Reputation?

[AdamWill]

That's the reputation of the power of the hardware. Yes, as far as playing your 3D games goes, you're not going to get very far with Intel.

However, up till now Intel has had a very good reputation for open source friendliness with regards to supporting the hardware, disregarding the actual power of the hardware. Intel are actively involved in maintaining the (100% open source) driver for all other Intel graphics chipsets, and they also contribute to general X.org development and the development of new technologies within X. Intel graphics hardware is generally the least powerful of the big three, but until this mess, it's been by far the best (and most openly) supported hardware in Linux.

Re:Reputation?

[RiotingPacifist]

when i broke my old laptop i 'upgraded' to one with an ATI chipset, how i year for the days of intel. now i have to choose between full-screen flash and composting (thanks to iplayer i went with flash)

Re:Reputation?

[Sockatume]

My understanding is that it's not for 3D gaming. The GMA500 performs poorly on that front but it supports a lot of video decode features that are AWOL in the GMA945 etc.

Re:Reputation?

[scientus]

their drivers are quality and open-source, which is better than ATI and nvidia, however there hardware is inferior which makes the result not game, or performance-worthy, by on reliability and open-source its much better than ATI and nv open-source drivers

Re:Reputation?

[scientus]

they are also the first to support the new true graphic card memory-management in the linux kernel, which will elad to some cool new stuff

Re:Reputation?

[ogdenk]

I don't know about "fine". Mediocre or "barely adequate" might be better choices. :-)

They suck for gaming or any serious 3D chores but for daily computing tasks, old games and GL screen savers, the GMA950 works great.

Re:Reputation?

[timeOday]

I wouldn't recommend composting on a laptop. If you must compost, I'd place the heap in the furthest corner of the back yard.

Re:Reputation?

[Toonol]

The longer PC gaming exists as a hobby, the smaller the percentage of games that need cutting-edge graphics cards to handle. Video games have been around for a couple decades now; 90% were made more than a couple years ago, built for older hardware.
I realize that you mentioned old games in your comment, but I wanted to stress that point. You can be a gamer and not need cutting edge hardware; you just need to avoid getting caught up in the urge to season's new releases immediately.

Re:Reputation?

[ogdenk]

I agree.

The games I play the most are Urban Terror (based on Quake 3 engine) and the IL2 flight sim series which IMHO is the best damn WW2 flight sim ever written.

Both run pretty well with a GMA950.

You won't be playing Doom 3, Unreal III or Crysis on a GMA950 however.

Re:Reputation?

[Jorophose]

Not necessarily. i810 is woefully broken. You get artifacts left and right, wrong resolution that can't be changed, no openGL working whatsoever (I was doing transparencies with Xfwm but that was it). From what I understand I need one of the latest kernels with GEM to make it stop.

Yeah, thanks intel.

Re:Reputation?

[MarcQuadra]

Actually, X drivers for Intel hardware from the i810 all the way up to today's latest-and-greatest X4500HD are all open-source and -very- good. The problem is that this particular chipset, the X500, which is -not- as powerful as some of their other existing stuff but is meant for very low-power devices, was licensed from a third party and therefore does not work with the existing -really good- driver.

Honestly, right now, if you want to see a shining star in Linux graphics, it's Intel, excepting this one oddball chip.

Their onboard graphics might not be awesome compared to ATI or Nvidia, but the open-source support for them is absolutely top-notch, leading me to buy Intel GMA chips for all the Linux systems I build.

Re:Reputation?

[AnonChef]

you just need to avoid getting caught up in the urge to season's new releases immediately.

The words, they make no sense..

Re:Reputation?

[FireFury03]

I thought the intel video chipset reputation was already something like "it sucks, ATI or nvidia are much better choices".

More like "it theoretically isn't as fast as nVidia or ATI, but it actually works". nVidia's binary drivers have been buggy piles of crap for as long as they've existed and their bug tracking process is completely opaque: you report a bug, it goes into some black hole and may eventually get fixed a couple of years later if you're lucky. But the only way you'll find out if its fixed is by trying it. Conversely, Intel runs open Bugzillas so you can keep an eye on the progress of bugs you report.

Intel is not without its problems, but I'd choose them over nVidia any day. I'm not sure how ATI is these days - last I heard they were going to publish specs for their devices but I have no idea how well they are supported by drivers these days.

Re:Reputation?

[hattig]

Tell that to my friend who can't get Linux to display anything on a laptop using i810 graphics.

Appalling hardware.
Appalling drivers.

And people think Larrabee will be good!

Re:Reputation?

[WhiteWolf666]

ATI/AMD has really done a tremendous about face Linux wise. I heartily recommend them. They've dramatically improved the quality and performance of the binary (non-oss) driver; it's equivalent to Windows performance wise, and very close feature wise, and it tends to be hassle free. They've also been releasing the binary drivers for new cards at the same time. On the oss side, they've been release specs like crazy, and the OSS driver is improving at a very rapid clip.

I'd still go with the binary driver for now, but in the not-so-distant future the in-kernel Linux support for the Radeon series will be fine for most purposes (i.e. every where you currently use an Intel chip).

Re:Reputation?

[petermgreen]

Maybe it's something apple did but i've found xorg on my intel macbook to be far from ideal. Google earth will take it down every time and every so often it falls over for no obvious reason.

And once it falls over it takes a reboot to make it work again.

Re:Reputation?

[petermgreen]

to clarify my previous post i'm talking about xorg under linux, I decided I didn't particualarly like OSX so the machine spends most of it's time running linux.

Re:Reputation?

[TheStonepedo]

Entirely offtopic, but have you tried MacPorts? Adding MacPorts lets you use many applications from the Linux F(L)OSS community that would otherwise have you booting Linux on Apple hardware. I've found that running most applications in OS X sucks a lot less power from the battery than running the same applications in Ubuntu. Then again, if you're tethered to a power cord you've no reason to run OS X.

Re:Reputation?

[Chops]

It seemed to me that i810 was fine up until Intel got involved with it. I have an unusual chipset (855GM on a desktop with no LVDS output), and new versions of Intel drivers keep totally failing to work on it in various exciting ways. Before Intel engineers started showing up on xorg bugzilla (i.e. when the module was called 'i810' instead of 'intel'), this happened once in a blue moon and I got responsive, polite fixes reasonably quickly. Now, it happens constantly, and I have to beat the engineers over the heads just to stop them closing a bug with comments which more or less translate to "we can't be bothered, sod off". When bugs do get fixed, it tends to take them a respectable fraction of a year to do it.

Interacting with Intel engineers on xorg bugzilla has sort of made me yearn for the days when GNU/Linux hardware drivers were crappy, desperate efforts slapped together with enormous difficulty without any specifications to work from.

Re:Reputation?

[Jorophose]

My thoughts exactly. Xubuntu 6.06 (so 2005 drivers) worked perfectly out of the box. Right resolution, right refresh rate, and it was able to do OpenGL accel (for almost everything).

But here I am with Lenny, and it's barely working...

Maybe switching to a 2.4 kernel would work? Or did they backport their crappy driver?

Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[HangingChad]

Microsoft threatening Intel unless they knock off the Linux integration. Now, all of a sudden, Intel is having all kinds of problems with their Linux drivers.

Coincidence or anti-competitive behavior in action?

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Microlith]

Astro-turfer for sure!

You even use the slashdot effect to take down critical articles!

(j/k)

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Alwin Henseler]

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Wiki quote)

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[dattaway]

Coincidence or anti-competitive behavior in action?

I've noticed lots of Microsoft news articles recently too.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Pecisk]

I think it is more about the lines of "omg, there is new sublaptop market here, quick, we need solution. Damn, our video chip uses too much power. Ok, there is some niche chip which could suit us. But there is lot of NDA and proprietary stuff. Heck, let's ride with it and see if it sticks. If not, we will abandon a driver."

It is clearly a totally different video card with different chip (which have closed parts not developed by Intel). So it ends there where usually such drivers goes - to trash can.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[AdamWill]

Coincidence, given that the documents discussed in that post are about 8 years old.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Cally]

No malice needed; it'd be stupidity for Intel to cave to Microsoft at this point. When the 25 stone gorilla's choking on a fishbone, d'you break out the Heimlich maneuver?

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Tumbleweed]

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. (Wiki quote)

A clever-sounding quote is not necessarily the same as wisdom or good advice. That's a great quote that people can pull out when they're being malicious and they want people to think they're not. It also keeps people from asking questions, which is generally not a good thing.

I'm also reminded of Godwin's Law about mentioning Hitler. It's generally used incorrectly (e.g. "If you compare someone to Hitler, you automatically lose.) The real law (according to Wikipedia) states "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." All this really seems to say to me is that people online get into heated arguments, and that the inevitable result of heated arguments online is that someone will call someone the worst name they could think of - Hitler. So basically, if you invoke Godwin's Law thinking that anyone automatically comparing someone to Hitler (like, say, someone with Fascist tendencies), you're the idiot because you don't know what Godwin's Law says. Sure, *most* people comparing someone to Hitler are going to be doing so only for shock value in the heat of an argument, but when you're talking about a politician with Fascist tendences, then, yeah, that comparison may be a valid point. If you don't keep track of those kinds of tendencies of people in positions of power, that's exactly what you could wind up with.

But I digress.

We've all seen the legal action against major tech companies about anti-competitive behaviour, price-fixing, and what-not, the emails from within Microsoft, etc. I'd think that at this point, anyone blindly assuming incompetence instead of malice on the part of a BigCo is kinda stupid.

The only clever saying I can think of that should pretty much always work is, "Question Authority."

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[42forty-two42]

Cache works for me.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[_Sprocket_]

Having spent a lot of time in various beurocracies, I can attest that malice and stupidity work very well together. While one does not guarantee the other, they are often interlinked.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[HiThere]

I think you need to look more carefully at the timing. This comes under the heading of "illusion of coincidence". The information from Boycott-Novell comes from a court case, and the source of the evidence is memos from around 2001. (I should check again, but that's how I remember it.) So there's probably 5 or more years in between. (Allowing for various slips in production.)

IOW, I don't think this is a causal connection. Possibly you could dig up something that was, but it probably isn't from this batch.

OTOH, it certainly indicates the KIND of activities that MS engages in (as if there were any doubt). And as a result it's reasonable to suspect that something similar, but as yet undiscovered, underlies this. But it's also quite reasonable that there could be other reasons. (They didn't design the technology, they bought it from someone else, and it might use patents that they don't have a clear title to, and so they can only use them in certain licensed ways, e.g.) Lacking facts one can easily invent numerous stories. Don't believe the stories that you invent to be truth, but only possibility. You may never determine the truth, and that has to be all right.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[jalefkowit]

All this really seems to say to me is that people online get into heated arguments, and that the inevitable result of heated arguments online is that someone will call someone the worst name they could think of - Hitler. So basically, if you invoke Godwin's Law thinking that anyone automatically comparing someone to Hitler (like, say, someone with Fascist tendencies), you're the idiot because you don't know what Godwin's Law says.

The reason why you "lose" when Godwin's Law is invoked is because it indicates that the thread has gone on long enough that anything worth saying has already been said. In other words, when people drag out the Hitler analogies, the discussion's over, even if they haven't realized it yet.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[pestilence669]

I argue for coincidence. First of all, even Microsoft relies on Linux for their infrastructure. As much as they try, it's just not possible to do many "things" on Windows. I wish I was allowed to go into more detail. Intel does realize the importance of solid Linux support. They are a leader in this area in ways they simply don't have to be. To snub Linux could compromise their foothold on the embedded market, which is significant. It's just not possible that this is intentional. Mistakes happen. I blame the outsourcing, which was probably some middle-manager's perceived ticket to promotion and praise. Companies this big can't always put their best resources on EVERY project. Since Slashdot has made this problem known, I can't imagine it'll exist for more than 30 days. The Slashdot effect is a great motivator in shifting corporate priorities. Seriously. I hate Intel. I do. In this case, however, I don't see that they've done much wrong. They will most likely issue a massive fix and add this component to their maintenance queue. Priorities.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[RightSaidFred99]

I'll give you a 10 for zealotry.

Unfortunately you get a 1 for reading comprehension. You do know the dates for that crap are, like, turn of the century?

Unless... maybe you think "all of a sudden" means 7-8 years.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[budgenator]

We've all seen the legal action against major tech companies about anti-competitive behaviour, price-fixing, and what-not, the emails from within Microsoft, etc. I'd think that at this point, anyone blindly assuming incompetence instead of malice on the part of a BigCo is kinda stupid.

You say that like malice and incompetence are mutually exclusive; I imagine execs at that level have wide spectrum of competencies and incompetencies to enough ego to render the later invisible to the introspective eye.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Tumbleweed]

No, you don't "lose" when Godwin's Law is invoked simply because it's invoked. It's quite often invoked at the first mention of Hitler, even when it's used as a relevant example (see also: Fascism). I can invoke the law of gravity when talking about friction, but that doesn't make it a valid invocation. It's similar to people invoking Moore's Law when they're talking about processor speed, which it isn't about, but has a relation to. Use it right or don't use it, I say.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Tycho]

It seems to me, that when Intel hypes a new forthcoming CPU that it often fails to mention the poor performance of the chipset to be paired with that CPU. The CPU ends up using the newest and greatest process, but saddles the CPU with a process at least two process nodes back. Not surprisingly, when the CPU and processor are matched together, the performance is often atrocious, due to the low performance chipset. Intel also has bad habit of attempting to save silicon die area by just dropping portions from the chip. Another company making the same chip could never get away with dropping the portions that Intel does in their designs. Intel gets away with it though because it essentially has a monopoly on x86 chips and Intel sets their poor performance as the baseline for the industry. Basically, Intel no longer cares about anything else other than raking in the cash.

I look forward to seeing Microsoft and Intel ending up being broken up and no longer being a force in the computer industry. Intel and Microsoft have each acted so egregiously, that Antitrust charges are probably being worked on by government lawyers for both companies.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[Xenographic]

> While one does not guarantee the other, they are often interlinked.

Wasn't there also a corollary to that statement that said that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice?

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[internewt]

internewt's law:

A usenet, forum, or other type of online post that is all a link to a Wikipedia article automatically disqualifies the poster from further contributions to the discussion.

I think I'll write a Wikipedia article about it! ;)

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[FearForWings]

While it may not be malice, Hanlon's razor doesn't mean people should get a free ride just because they are idiots.

Re:Wonder if this is one of the reasons?

[MobyDisk]

Your link is not functioning.

You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel graphics chips are not for games. However, if you don't play games and you want a solid graphics card with enough 3D performance to run compiz or Quake with fully open source drivers, then Intel is what you want.

Or, it used to be. I don't know what the deal is with this new chipset.

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[jabuzz]

The 3D is licensed from PowerVR, aka Imagination Technologies which used to be called Videologic for those with long memories.

It has nothing to do with Intel (other than that they licensed it), and historically Videologic, when they where in the PC graphics card business where tight lipped about their stuff, rather like nVidia are.

Which all sorts of sucks because the chipset does pretty good 3D for virtually no power. Which should finally mean some netbooks with decent battery lives.

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[wjh31]

if you dont play games but want to run quake?

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake is not a game. It is a murder simulator.

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[_Sprocket_]

No. Quake is not a game. It is a network performance analyzer.

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[Anpheus]

It's a murder stimulator?

Re:You are correct when it comes to 3D performance

[Groo Wanderer]

Like he said, it is a murder simulator. You analyze your network performance to find out who you have to kill for torrenting porn at work, sucking up all YOUR bandwidth.

            -Charlie

!gonvidia

[paroneayea]

I'm noticing the tag 'gonvidia', and it's true... as in terms of hardware, Nvidia does seem to be the best. But as in terms of the linux community, they pretty much create problems for everyone. And yes, I know, to the end user that's not always apparent. But the linux desktop really would be a lot farther along if it weren't for nvidia's refusal to open up to the free software community.

If Intel's new open source graphic drivers suck, then obviously yes, that's shitty. But between them and nvidia, if you're going to praise one or the other in the Linux community, it shouldn't be nvidia. Intel's graphic cards still don't support GLSL and the like, but at least you can run an open source driver and it works.

Re:!gonvidia

[Anonymous Coward]

If being open source means the open source community will fix it, why aren't they contributing and fixing these drivers already? Why should it matter which drivers you get?

Re:!gonvidia

[dattaway]

More importantly, distributions with closed source drivers are very fragile and easily break. Having an open source driver, its easy to find what went wrong with the changes and fix that. The closed source drivers don't like change. That's my 10+ years with Linux.

Re:!gonvidia

[Racemaniac]

i don't know how it is in this case, but most of the times, the problem is that there is no information about the hardware. so even though the open source community would love to code uber awesome megadrivers, they haven't got any documents on how these chipsets work, so they can't write drivers for them

Re:!gonvidia

[427_ci_505]

Speaking as somebody using an Nvidia Quadro NVS140M on a Thinkpad with the 177 drivers in Linux,

all I have to say is,

my next computer will pack an ATI Radeon. I've never seen drivers that sucked as bad, both in performance and in rendering things correctly, as Nvidia.
When compiz is enabled, and especially in QT4 apps, it doesn't handle repainting damaged screen areas correctly. That is not acceptable. The newer drivers, while marginally better at handling this, break suspend to ram functionality.

If anyone is considering an Nvidia card to run under Linux, my advice is to run as far away as possible.
The only ATI card I've used under linux is a radeon 9800pro on a desktop, and it is flawless. Both in performance and correctness of what it renders.

Now the Nvidia card does work correctly under windows, but I boot into windows only about once every couple of months, so...

Re:!gonvidia

[AaronW]

The performance issue should be fixed now in the latest driver version. It was a known bug and nVidia fixed it. I have no problems with the 180.25 driver.

Re:!gonvidia

[427_ci_505]

What about suspend to ram and the damaged area refresh problem?

Re:!gonvidia

[Kjella]

But the linux desktop really would be a lot farther along if it weren't for nvidia's refusal to open up to the free software community.

nVidias stance is pretty simple: No open source support, period. No specifications, no features of really any kind in the open nv drivers, no help to those who ask, no nothing.

What they have delivers is addition to hardware is a great closed source driver which have simply been the best in terms of perforamnce, features and quality for anything better than integrated graphics. Catalyst (AMD/ATIs driver) has been a mess and despite improving greatly since AMD took over, they're not there yet. While AMD has opened their specifications, the open source Radeon drivers are far, far off from the closed source drivers still. AMD has still said their primary commitment is Catalyst, so who knows when if it'll ever get as good as that, which I said isn't as good as nVidia's.

nVidia has constantly been the ones pushing the boundries for what the Linux desktop can do. Just recently before Christmas they delivered the first working hardware accelerated h.264/vc-1 HD playback /VDPAU) and it's available on pretty much all mainstream nVidia cards. ATI is thinking of maybe adding UVD support to their closed source driver and any open source support is unlikely and certainly not coming soon. Poulsbo is the first I've heard from Intel that actually supports VA API and it sure isn't mainstream motherboards.

You talk as if nVidia has been keeping open source back and maybe the open source infrastructure would have been better if nVidia worked with them instead of doing their own thing. But the Linux desktop? I doubt it. It's been over a year since AMDs first release of specifications, go check out the current state of the open source drivers. When you come back, you might realize that for a long time, the best way to show a Linux desktop has been a nVidia machine with proprietary drivers, not ideologically pure but it works well. But sure, blame the guy up front plowing the road for not towing the open source community too. If the open source community could pull it off, they have the chance now as AMDs specs are in the open, that excuse is gone. Put up or STFU.

Re:!gonvidia

[LingNoi]

If I had mod points you'd be getting them. Everything you said was spot on.

Re:!gonvidia

[Bacon Bits]

Yes, KDE4... what a rock-solid release that was when it hit. How well-tested, robust, and highly compatible. Why nobody in their right minds would consider KDE4 a complete failure at launch.

Re:!gonvidia

[LingNoi]

Yeah, lets not pick a product based on smart decisions like if it works better or not.

No, lets pick products based on their feelings towards open source. Yeah, that makes total sense..

Re:!gonvidia

[lbbros]

What does KDE4 have to do with the fact that NVIDIA drivers were crappy when it came to supporting translucency and stuff? With older NVIDIA cards, I have worse performance than on my EeePC (GMA 900). That would mean something.

Re:!gonvidia

[Zebedeu]

What they have delivers is addition to hardware is a great closed source driver which have simply been the best in terms of perforamnce, features and quality for anything better than integrated graphics

Really? I my laptop I keep getting little drawing errors here and there (window borders are weird, etc), and sometimes the whole screen becomes corrupted to hell. I have to close the laptop screen and reopen it.

I've been having problems with nVidia drivers since I got this laptop 2 years ago, and thorugh all the versions of drivers, kernels and compiz, there was always something which was breaking.

Comparatively, this computer with the open source driver, or my other computers with Intel drivers work perfectly with exactly the same software and configuration.

Maybe nVidia is suplying the best drivers in existence, but I'm just not getting them here. For me it's simple, my next computer won't have nVidia hardware anywhere near it (same deal as with Via hardware, same reasons).

Re:!gonvidia

[Bacon Bits]

KDE dev team clearly couldn't be arsed to fix bugs in their own code base prior to KDE4's release. I find it doubtful they even contacted nVidia about theirs.

Re:!gonvidia

[ion.simon.c]

Here's the problem, boss.
The PP lives in a video-game-playing world. You and I live in a desktop-effects and xrender-acceleration world. Our world gets the short end of the stick 'cause it's not very sexy.

Re:!gonvidia

[ion.simon.c]

From what I can see, KDE 4.2 *is* the end-user launch of KDE4. Have you given it a shot? If not, you really should.

Re:!gonvidia

[LingNoi]

Your zealous fanaticism for open source is clearly apparent and clouding your judgement on the situation.

I find it humorous in the middle of an article about how shitty an open source driver is that you see it fit to blame nvidia for breaking a developer release of KDE. The worse part is you think it matters.

Do you get this angry when an open source driver has a bug? No.

With older NVIDIA cards, I have worse performance than on my EeePC (GMA 900).

Your old cards aren't as good as your new ones? shock! horror! Say it isn't so!

Re:!gonvidia

[darkmeridian]

Linux open source purists want special treatment from manufacturers, and it makes no sense. ATI opens specs but their Linux drivers suck. nVidia has great Linux desktop support that advances the state of the art for Linux, as you admit, but they didn't release an open-source driver so you knock them for that.

But nVidia does not release the source code for Windows, either. They are treating all the operating systems exactly the same. Why would a non-zealot go with ATI when nVidia's closed source driver is far superior?

Re:!gonvidia

[Kjella]

Three things I didn't say:
1. The nVidia driver is best on integrated graphics. I was talking about the field where Intel isn't playing.
2. The nVidia driver is bug free. Hell no, it got issues like everything else.
3. It's the best at keeping track of kernel and xorg changes. They're not, sometimes support for new interfaces and whatnot comes slowly. nVidia hooks into X lots of places to do what they do, and it can mess up things. If all you want is a simple driver that can show you a pretty picture, there are better options. Their strength is when there's something serious to do in the driver that you're not getting from the rest.

Re:!gonvidia

[symbolset]

Yeah, that makes total sense..

Yes. Yes it does.

Re:!gonvidia

[lbbros]

Where do you see "zealous fanaticism"? I merely said that NVIDIA's binary blob isn't as great as it's marketed to be (although it has much, much improved with the 180.xx series of drivers). FYI, I use fglrx (ATI's own blob) on my desktop PC. It's not a matter of ideals, it's a matter of quality. NVIDIA took a lot of flak, rightfully, because with ARGB visuals their drivers sucked. No one had noticed before because no one had tried to do that stuff.

Re:!gonvidia

[Zebedeu]

3. It's the best at keeping track of kernel and xorg changes. They're not, sometimes support for new interfaces and whatnot comes slowly. nVidia hooks into X lots of places to do what they do, and it can mess up things. If all you want is a simple driver that can show you a pretty picture, there are better options. Their strength is when there's something serious to do in the driver that you're not getting from the rest.

I don't know. Intel seems to have been doing well in keeping their open source driver up to date (except in the case of this story). Maybe their hardware sucks harder than nVidia's, but at least the driver doesn't have a history of bugs and slow adaptation like it's closed-source counterparts.

But keep your blindfolds on, man. They look comfortable on you.

Re:!gonvidia

[lbbros]

While we disagree and that's not a problem, it would be nice if you didn't spread FUD. Sebastian Kuegler (KDE developer) posted about it in his blog. Plus, NVIDIA itself mentioned increased performance in Plasma and KDE4 in general in the release notes of the first or second (IIRC) 180.xx beta driver.

Re:!gonvidia

[Kjella]

Advancing the state of art and going open source isn't mutually exclusive so if you'd like them to do both that's rational. As for the rest, I think everyone is on a line between the purely factual "this is what Linux is, ideology means nothing" to RMS "ideology is everything". I'm nowhere near a purist though I run Linux, I use the blob and I run Windows in a virtualbox and will gladly fire up the closed source games I can make work in WINE. That said I cleary prefer open source because I have a belief that using open source makes it better. Whether it's showing up in browser stats, increasing the market for web applications or cross platform applications over windows applications, showing someone else how to use an open source application or filling a bug report to make it better I think it matters and furthers my own desktop in the long run. It means I'm willing to use software not quite so nice and polished as long as they're "close enough" for my choice of close enough. Personally, I'm hoping that by the time I'm ready to buy another graphics card (probably 5xxx class radeon timeframe) that AMD open source drivers will be close enough. I'm certainly not buying one to run Catalyst, done that mistake once.

Re:!gonvidia

[budgenator]

every time my kernel upgrades I hold my breath and hope X starts up due to nVidia drivers being proprietary.

Re:!gonvidia

[MrHanky]

With older NVIDIA cards, I have worse performance than on my EeePC (GMA 900).

Your old cards aren't as good as your new ones? shock! horror! Say it isn't so!

The GMA 900 is slower in games than a Geforce 6200, a several generations old budget GPU from nvidia. And anyway, nvidia have recently released a driver update that to a great extent fixed the problem with KDE, which suggests (as was already known) that the performance problem was indeed a driver issue.

But don't let random facts get in the way in your holy crusade against the godless open source zealots.

Re:!gonvidia

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I've not tested _extensively_ but 180 drivers work fine with my GeForce 6200; certainly an improvement over 177.

Re:!gonvidia

[427_ci_505]

^Yes, but I'm using the FGLRX driver, not the open source radeon driver. Both work very well.

Re:!gonvidia

[ericrost]

No one had noticed before because no one had tried to do that stuff.

Shock, you mean an untested, unused feature in their driver didn't get the bugs worked out of it till someone tried to use it? That's SO different to a an open source driver. nVidia has been the best thing to happen to the linux desktop since sliced bread. I can play 3d games, accelerated video, and have a slick composited desktop that doesn't freeze every time I try to switch terminals. Any time I tried to do those things with any other product I came up short.

Re:!gonvidia

[Clarious]

Suspend to Ram is fixed in 180.25 too, I don't have the latter problem with previous driver so I don't know if it is fixed or not, though some people said it is fixed on Nvidia forum

Re:!gonvidia

[Just Some Guy]

You do realize that you never ever absolutely have to upgrade your kernel if everything is working hunky-dory, right?

Spare some love for non-Linux OSes. I had a choice with an Nvidia card in my FreeBSD system a while back: upgrade the kernel to fix security vulnerabilities or keep using my graphics card. Nvidia had deprecated my card, so the driver that was compatible with the new kernel didn't support it. Since it was an AGP 2x motherboard that couldn't accept newer cards, the choice really came down to upgrading the kernel, graphics card, motherboard, CPU, and RAM, or sticking with an insecure system. Yay, binary blob drivers!

Re:!gonvidia

[bit01]

They are treating all the operating systems exactly the same.

The Linux kernel developers treats all device vendors exactly the same too. Some device vendors are zealots, they want everything to be closed source and to have extra privileges.

See that works? Some bigots fail to see their own bigotry. The reality is that there is a complex set of competing interests.

---

Paid marketers are the worst zealots.

Re:!gonvidia

[Albert Sandberg]

Not to be too picky, but if you were using a agp2x card (using free bsd) and had that old of a system you were hardly playing games on it anyway, were you? And you could probably stick without the graphics acceleration, right?

Re:!gonvidia

[Just Some Guy]

Not to be too picky, but if you were using a agp2x card (using free bsd) and had that old of a system you were hardly playing games on it anyway, were you?

I liked an occasional game of Tux Racer and some Second Life. Oh, and I forgot a little detail earlier: I got it backwards, and the security vulnerability was in the NVidia driver itself! They didn't backport the fix to the version of the driver that supported my card. With FOSS, at least I could try to port it myself.

And you could probably stick without the graphics acceleration, right?

Sure, but why? Although old, the card itself worked fine. The rest of the system was in great shape, too. There's no reason in the world why I should have had to upgrade everything to replace a working system as long as I'm OK with its performance.

Re:!gonvidia

[Spider[DAC]]

No, Suspend to Ram BROKE with 180.x series and worked with 17x series.

Re:!gonvidia

[budgenator]

No it doesn't, but when company is coming over, the house gets cleaned up better than when it just us, like wise when your source is exposed to public scrutiny, you clean it up a bit better as well. The cleaner the code, the easier it is to update and maintain.

Re:!gonvidia

[evilviper]

Why would a non-zealot go with ATI when nVidia's closed source driver is far superior?

Because the next Linux update may make your NVidia drivers fail to compile and/or work.

I had to downgrade from Slack 12.2 because the most recent version of the driver that supported my GeForce4 card wouldn't compile on the system.

Developing drivers for Linux isn't like Windows, where everyone is on the same version, at the same times. It's a moving target, and NVidia hasn't shown ANY commitment to maintain support for their hardware more than a couple years after it is sold.

Re:!gonvidia

[bit01]

See the difference?

No difference, you've missed my point entirely. Reread my post. Nobody's said anything about Windows NVidia drivers being open source, just the linux ones. Like most other linux device drivers.

In any case what the hell is wrong with people saying what they want? NVidia wants to be closed source (in my opinion for stupid reasons but there you go), others want their computer's graphics to be open source. Both positions are valid points of view. Both NVidia and linux users have to decide how far to compromise. Currently the balance is that NVidia does support the linux platform but only with low quality* closed source drivers. NVidia makes some hardware sales and gets *some* brownie points for limited Linux support and most linux/nvidia users use those drivers anyway but it doesn't mean they don't want to improve the situation.

* Low quality in the sense that it's closed source and unmaintainable, unportable and unauditable by third parties, not that the code NVidia is writing is necessarily buggy.

---

I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?

Re:!gonvidia

[Max Littlemore]

But sure, blame the guy up front plowing the road for not towing the open source community too.

Sure it's not fair to blame the guy poughing the road for not towing others, it's hard enough dragging a plough through tarmac.

What I want to know is this: why is nVidia using a plough to cut a fucking great ditch in the road rather than grading it so it's a smooth ride for others?

Re:!gonvidia

[Raenex]

Linux open source purists want special treatment from manufacturers, and it makes no sense.

What doesn't make sense is sellers of hardware treating the interface to the hardware as a trade secret. Do the CPU manufacturers do this? Why do the video guys do this? Obviously they don't have to, as Intel and ATI have released specs. These guys are selling hardware. Why do they want to make their hardware less useful to consumers, by limiting the after-market support for it?

Re:!gonvidia

[Clarious]

Yes, It worked in 17x, then broke in 180.* prior to 180.25. It is fixed in the beta version now.

Re:!gonvidia

[kelnos]

Preface: my experience is a little out of date.

It's funny, though. For years (I guess about 5-6 years) I used nvidia's proprietary driver. I was plagued with crashes and lockups that were clearly video-related. I had three different video cards and two different machines, so it likely wasn't the hardware. (And I did very little to no 3D; most of my problems came from running an XRender-based compositing manager.) My average uptime was under a week; sometimes the box would hard-lock, other times I could still ssh in, but the video was wedged and I couldn't get X running again without a reboot. I regularly updated the driver when new releases came out, hoping the next version would fix things, and participated in nvidia's support forum and gave as much information as I could find. End result: disappointed customer.

A couple years ago I got a ppc laptop, and of course nvidia doesn't support Linux/ppc. So I've been using the rather-experimental reverse-engineered nouveau driver. It works ridiculously well. After some initial testing and troubleshooting (in which I helped developers by testing patches on my hardware), it's been rock-solid for over a year now. Sadly, it's missing 3D support, but I can live without that.

I'm going to be buying a new laptop this summer, and it will probably end up being x86 with nvidia graphics. I'll likely run nouveau on it, despite proprietary support from nvidia. I just don't trust them to keep my system stable.

I'll certainly acknowledge that they've done some revolutionary things with their driver. But if they can't get the basics right, it's pretty useless to me. At least with an open source driver, it's *possible* that I or someone else could figure out what's wrong and fix it. And if all their "revolutionary" improvements only work with their proprietary driver and their hardware, it's pretty useless for the community at large.

Re:!gonvidia

[kelnos]

When I used nvidia's proprietary driver with a composited desktop, the machine would mysteriously lock up at least once a week. Strangely, the experimental nouveau driver has no such problems. (Sadly, it lacks features like nobody's business, but I value stability over 3D support.)

Oh look, I refuted your anecdote with more anecdotal evidence! Go me!

Re:!gonvidia

[kelnos]

But nVidia does not release the source code for Windows, either.

Yeah, and I don't use nvidia's closed-source driver on Windows, either.

Re:!gonvidia

[ericrost]

You had your xorg.conf set up improperly, do some googling and you'll confirm this. It works pretty darned flawlessly now.

GMA 500 is based on PowerVR

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there was an upto-date PowerVR driver in X.org already: the not-so-obvious solution may be to merge the Intel GMA500 driver & PowerVR driver to create a better GMA 500.

Of course this assumes that there is an upto date PowerVR driver and that the GMA500 is close enough to existing PowerVR chips to make it worth the effort...

BUILD YOUR OWN

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you're not using open source chips?

Re:BUILD YOUR OWN

[Yvan256]

I sure am!

If it's open source, fix it.

[tjstork]

If the Linux community wants open driver development, then, it should write them. Intel made an open source driver, and now the author is condemning the code? Geez, how about fixing it! If you want something to be community owned, well that community has to step up. It's not Intel's responsibility.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[HeronBlademaster]

Even if the driver is open source, the chipset documentation might not be. As others have mentioned, it's hard to know how to write a good driver working with nothing more than a bad driver. You need good documentation.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[Ritchie70]

Based on reading the various linked things, it appears that one primary complaint is that it isn't, in fact, sensibly released. There are bits and pieces of it scattered about but AdamWill can't actually find a whole release that actually works.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[Pecisk]

It is undocumented and it has binary blob. Though scenario, even for very smart Xorg driver fellas.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[AdamWill]

Intel *didn't* make an open source driver. If you read my post, you'll note that there's three different closed-source components to the driver, without which significant features break.

Aside from that, what's needed for meaningful open source development is not "here's some code, have fun". There needs to be a proper development process hosted in an accessible fashion, and proper documentation. The 'intel' driver for previous Intel chipsets satisfies all of these goals. It's 100% open-source, it's developed within X.org and so easily accessible to external contributions in a widely-understood fashion, and the hardware is properly documented.

This 'psb' driver satisfies none of the goals. It was previously hosted within Moblin (which doesn't really have much of an external development community), and even that version of the code is now not being used. It now only shows up in obscure Ubuntu Netbook Remix repositories, with no independent source that anyone can find. So there's no sane development process to which external people can sensibly contribute. It contains large closed-source chunks. And there's no public hardware documentation, which makes it very hard for anyone else to work on it in the first place.

This is what I (and anyone else stuck with one of these chips) am complaining about.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[sjames]

The author is asking the person who knows it best to kindly pull it all together and properly contribute it. Then others will be able to take over if needed.

Dumping code snippets into a bag and tossing it out there isn't really a proper release.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[tjstork]

Aside from that, what's needed for meaningful open source development is not "here's some code, have fun". Th

But what you are really asking for is free infrastructure. Give us the collaborative tools, documentation, and money, then, you say, you can make an open source system. Well guess what, all of that stuff is part of what the development of non-free software costs. If open source is really going to be free, it means that, you know, it has to be free. You can't really go and sock someone with a bill for a bunch of money to have your "free" project now, can you?

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[tjstork]

It is undocumented and it has binary blob. Though scenario, even for very smart Xorg driver fellas.

And, you might think that "very smart" Xorg fellas might have some better diplomacy than ripping a company on slashdot. Yeah, that's real smart.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[AdamWill]

Gwenole, thanks for the info about IEGD, but you're way off base about other stuff.

One, I know the drivers are not open source. That was a large part of what the rant was about.

Two, how can you not understand what my complaint is? It's not that there's no driver. And it's not that the driver is not open source, except that that is related to the real problem. My problem is very simply that the drivers don't fucking work. The post is simply a long explanation of the series of crappy decisions which caused that. I would like for the drivers to be open source and Intel has a public commitment to *make* open source drivers (that they're not keeping), but if they could get their shit together to provide a sane closed source driver that gave me functioning native resolution accelerated 2D, that would be absolutely freaking dandy for me (although it obviously wouldn't be satisfactory for Fedora). All I want is a driver that is available in a logical place, that installs sensibly, and that provides basic 2D functionality, on perfectly normal modern distributions (Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009, Fedora 10, OpenSUSE 11, etc). This should not be a problem.

Finally, I hadn't actually started working for Red Hat when I wrote that post, though it was incorrectly reported as being from 'Red Hat's Adam Williamson' in a couple of places. Regardless, I'm not in driver development, I'm not involved in talking directly to Intel. When I write about stuff like that on my *personal* blog - not on any official site for any distribution - I am writing as a user just like anyone else, quite simply saying that for a perfectly normal person who went out and bought one of these chipsets and tried to run Linux on it, the situation is massively crappy. I'm not going to let who I work for stop me from doing that, neither when it was Mandriva nor now it's Red Hat. If I want to take an issue up through official channels, I will do that, but if you see it on my blog, that is just me.

You seem to think there's no real problem with this situation, which is odd because you seem quite informed about at least parts of it. Everyone else I've spoken to with knowledge of it (including high-level X developers and folks directly involved with Intel on this issue) has quite clearly said that it is, basically, a giant clusterfuck. There doesn't appear to be any disagreement that it's a big mess.

Re:If it's open source, fix it.

[AdamWill]

No, I'm telling them to use the existing architecture. To put it bluntly, to do it in X.org. I suspect the only reason it wasn't done this way in the first place is that X.org won't take a driver that depends on a binary blob.

Bit of a tangent

[93 Escort Wagon]

Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies, ...

That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why? Usually when one of my FOSS friends goes on a rant about this, he's too worked up to be comprehensible.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly because your friend is an idiot who has no idea what he's talking about? Intel release huge amounts of documentation, freely, they were one of the first companies to write and push their own drivers into the Linux kernel tree and almost all of their hardware is well supported with OSS drivers.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[HeronBlademaster]

Intel's wireless 3945ABG Linux drivers are pretty good. The firmward microcode is released under a closed-source license, but the drivers themselves are open source (and in fact are part of the Linux kernel). That may be offensive to some OSS purists, but I'd rather have good, open-source drivers with closed firmware than non-functional open-source drivers.

It's the same with my opinion about nvidia's drivers. Sure, they're closed-source. But I'd rather nVidia give us working 3d drivers than be stuck with the crappy open-source 2d-only nv driver. It'd be nice if they were open-source, but I'm not going to refuse to use them out of some misguided idealism.

Put another way, if I'm dying of thirst, and a known thief offers me stolen water, I'm going to drink it - it's not like the water is tainted. Maybe that makes me an accessory to a crime (or, in software terms, maybe it encourages closed drivers) but it's better than dying of thirst (or, better than having no 3d drivers at all). nVidia has no real motivation to give us open-source 3d drivers in the first place, so refusing to use their closed driver won't make them change their minds.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[WeblionX]

It's probably because he's zealous. Zealotry tends to fry one's brain.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[MadMidnightBomber]

Intel eepro10/100 cards are really good, as is their wireless stuff. Your friend is talking shit- except Intel pretended that AMD didn't do 64 bits first.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Creepy Crawler]

I'd agree. I had a rather nasty return on a DV6990 HP laptop. It was trash, but that's aside the point.

I went and bought a T61, all intel down to the graphics card. Better wattage drain and complete open source drivers. Ubuntu detects everything on here, with exception to the HD APS system, which I can do without (it drains batt 2w extra).

And then, I find out that Intel releases everything about their 3d system.. And because of that, Linux devs are working on a Graphical Memory Manager, called GEM. Come to find out, it only works for Intel because they're soo open. They know they sell hardware, not their drivers.

Hopefully, AMD/ATI will follow and do the same. Wonder where that leaves nVidia...

Re:Bit of a tangent

[MostAwesomeDude]

You got modded up, so I get to correct you.

GEM (Graphics Execution Manager) is only working for Intel because they have more people working on it. There's only around four or five people working on Radeon stuff, and of those, only two of us are dedicated to ATI work, and we're both students.

If you grab development snapshots, you can see Radeons working with DRI2, GEM, KMS, and all that fancy stuff.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[HeronBlademaster]

By "crappy" I wasn't necessarily referring to the quality of the code - in fact I've never looked at the code - I was simply referring to the much smaller feature set as compared to the 3d-capable nVidia driver.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Nick Ives]

The firmward microcode is released under a closed-source license

That'd be because it contains the code to physically setup the device and any variation to it would cause it to break its FCC certification.

There's a fuzzy line between device level firmware which nobody ever wants to change (because it could cause your machine to literally blow up) and the driver code which, of course, we want to be free. Apparently it's because hardware manufacturers have shifted away from having firmware on a ROM and instead started distributing the microcode with the driver instead. It cuts manufacturing costs and makes microcode updates less dangerous.

I can't be arsed finding a link but even RMS accepts that it's OK for such microcode to stay as a blob.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[HeronBlademaster]

I wasn't saying I disagreed with the decision, I was only clarifying which parts were open source and which parts weren't.

I have noticed, however, that the Windows driver allows a larger range of settings than the Linux driver (unless I'm woefully uneducated about how to change the settings in Linux). For example, I can boost the transmit power in the Windows driver getting me better signal strength on some networks, but I can't do the same (or, I'm unaware of how to do so) for the Linux driver, meaning I get wireless access in some places at school in Windows but not in Linux. It's actually quite frustrating, seeing as how I'm trying to get used to working completely in Linux for my upcoming full-time job.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Kjella]

And then, I find out that Intel releases everything about their 3d system.. And because of that, Linux devs are working on a Graphical Memory Manager, called GEM. Come to find out, it only works for Intel because they're soo open.

Wow, way to be off the mark. Before GEM, every driver did their own memory management. With GEM it is being done by a common memory manager in the kernel. Pretty much all the open drivers (intel, radeon, nouveau) are in the process of moving to GEM, which was a very recent addition to the kernel (2.6.28). AMD and nVidias blobs will probably continue to use their own memory manager. In short, everyone has a variation of what GEM does already and redoing the memory management (well, not all of it but enough) isn't done in a flash.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Creepy Crawler]

All the better to be corrected by someone who _knows_ :)
(i read your sig)

Much appreciated.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[CarpetShark]

That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why?

I'm guessing that, rather than supporting FOSS because of the ethics of free software, they're just people who support the underdogs, which happens to include FOSS in the software world, and exclude Intel in the CPU world.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[A Life in Hell]

Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies, ...

That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why? Usually when one of my FOSS friends goes on a rant about this, he's too worked up to be comprehensible.

History, primarily. If you wind back the clock ten to fifteen years, intel were a bunch of evil motherfuckers to pretty much everyone they encountered - not to mention the "Wintel" alliance between intel and microsoft, back in the day (what, you thought that term just materialised out of fat air?)

As they say, redemption isn't all it's cracked up to be, and some people are having trouble getting past that shit. Personally, I think intel have succeeded at redemption - however, I can see where these guys are coming from. They are nothing if not a fairweather friend.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[makomk]

Funny story really... originally, everyone was working on something called TTM, which did much the same thing as GEM does now, and was designed to be suitable for all graphics cards. Progress was slow (mostly volunteer developers) but steady. Then the Intel driver's developers decided they wanted to go their own way, and ripped it out in favour of their own simpler solution, GEM - which only worked for Intel graphics hardware. Since Intel was the only open hardware at the time, they got their way. So the real reason that GEM only works for Intel hardware is because it was designed to support Intel graphics and Intel graphics only.

(This also set development of the equivalent functionality for other hardware back a bit, since the developers were set on TTM, and GEM was useless to them as it stood.)

Re:Bit of a tangent

[pipatron]

$ man iwconfig

...

txpower

For cards supporting multiple transmit powers, sets the transmit power in dBm. If W is the power in Watt, the power in dBm is P = 30 + 10.log(W).

If the value is postfixed by mW, it will be automatically converted to dBm.

In addition, on and off enable and disable the radio, and auto and fixed enable and disable power control (if those features are available).

Examples :

• iwconfig eth0 txpower 15
• iwconfig eth0 txpower 30mW
• iwconfig eth0 txpower auto
• iwconfig eth0 txpower off

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Ant P.]

Just to be an asshole, I'm going to correct you too with a car analogy!

GEM is working on Intel because they're the ones who initially wrote it. It's a bit like showing up at a road race with an antigravity mach-1 craft invented in secret, then handing out schematics to it to the other drivers and speeding off over the horizon.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[penguinchris]

I have a T61 with the intel 965 chipset too, and while I appreciate that it works better out of the box than I imagine an nvidia or ati video card does, I *do* occasionally have issues with it.

Now, I love the T61 in general - though not everything worked perfectly when I first got it a year ago, development has really come along well and just about everything works great (save for the HD APS as you mentioned, and fingerprint scanner support is still not really usable.)

Of course, I did get mine with SUSE preinstalled rather than windows when they still offered that, so you'd hope they would include hardware that works with linux :) I use openSUSE and wiped the out of date SUSE installation when I got it, by the way.

But, I do have problems with 3d, despite intel being completely open about it.

I'm not saying it's not supported well - it is, obviously - but it's far from flawless. And if you do have a problem, your only good option is to wait until the xorg video drivers are updated officially, because trying to compile the drivers from the intel video site is pretty ridiculous (I'm not exactly an expert but this is literally the only thing I haven't managed to compile into the kernel and get working.)

The main problem I've had (besides poor 3d performance in games) are certain applications using 3D (most notably Google Earth) completely hard-freezing the system. Google Earth is useful to me for my master's thesis project in geology so not having it working is an inconvenience.

Besides that, just working with the video card in general is never quite right - using dual displays never worked for me (other than straight cloning) until just last week when I updated to the latest video driver, for example. Also, when starting or shutting down x I get a scrambled, corrupted display for a second or two.

I agree with you that intel should be lauded for their support of open source, but it does have a lot of issues still. The big thing is that the intel video drivers that are available when a chipset is released don't seem to fully support the chipset well - as I said, it's only now that most things seem to work decently with the 965 chip, and it's been out for a while.

Of course, your mileage may vary, and it could just be me :) I know I'm expecting too much out of it to be able to run more advanced 3D games (Quake 3 and BZflag work fine, for example, but most of the newer games run very poorly.) I use my computer primarily as a workstation, though, and the fact that it has problems with Google Earth and things like that is an issue. The only game I spend a lot of time with is knetwalk, and that runs fine :)

Another thread was discussing HD video performance on intel video cards, and though my post is already long I'll throw this in - videos, HD or otherwise, run fine on the intel 965 and look great. I guess I don't know if it's hardware accelerated or not but it doesn't really matter, it looks and runs fine, even 1080p blu-ray rips.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[Hal_Porter]

Intel has a reputation as one of the most clued-up open source-friendly hardware companies, ...

That's interesting, because I've noticed that many of the FOSS folks I know (the ones that seem especially zealous) have a particular disdain for Intel or anything they've touched. Could anyone clue me in regarding why? Usually when one of my FOSS friends goes on a rant about this, he's too worked up to be comprehensible.

Why do you assume that people who are ranting and are 'too worked up to be comprehensible' even have a point?

Re:Bit of a tangent

[howlingmadhowie]

i think it has something to do with intel's sabotaging of the olpc project and their continued insider dealing against amd.

Re:Bit of a tangent

[AncientPC]

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw

Re:GMA 500!!?

[Narishma]

The GMA 500 is way better than the 950 performance-wise.

Re:GMA 500!!?

[anss123]

The GMA 500 is way better than the 950 performance-wise.

Typing "GMA 500 benchmark" into google produces a 3D Mark03 score of 427, while GMA 950 scores 2900. Sure sure, there can be bad drivers involved but that's still quite a climb for the GMA 500.

Compositing = Easy

[CarpetShark]

Compositing doesn't take a lot of power, despite how Linux has struggled with it. I mean, come on, at worst it's two triangles per window, with textures and alpha-blending. Maybe an extra four tris with colour and an alpha map for shadow. My 2001 ibook could do it in OS X, and that was running a Rage Mobility M3. I think it's 16MB.

Re:Compositing = Easy

[ogdenk]

On your 2001 iBook it was a mobile Rage 128-based GPU and it wasn't capable of using Quartz Extreme for 3D-accelerated compositing. They went from the Rage 128-based chip to a Radeon 7000 I believe in the G3 iBooks.

It was done in software with Quartz and some 2D acceleration. Still worked f**king great though. Impressively snappy even on an old 350mhz G3 tower. Much more usable than the XRender-based compositing offered as an alternative to XComposite in KDE4.

Re:Compositing = Easy

[kelnos]

Much more usable than the XRender-based compositing offered as an alternative to XComposite in KDE4.

The two are not mutually exclusive. XComposite is the extension that makes composited window rendering possible at all. (All it does is allow a compositing manager to redirect rendering offscreen.) XRender is one possibility for the compositing manager to render the desktop using hardware acceleration. OpenGL is another. I'm not sure how KDE4 does it. Either way, they're gonna be using XComposite in some capacity.

Not really a tangent.

[Joseph_Daniel_Zukige]

Look around and open your eyes. But you have to look in the corners and shadows, too.

(Click the show more and read all the comments.)

My distaste for iNTEL comes from several sources, one is the lies they told about segmentation and about turing complete back in the 1980s. One recent one is what they did to UWB.

But you have to look really close, because their PR thugs are very good at locating the negative information and "cleaning" it up.

Ask yourself, what good will even the GPL do when iNTEL owns the tech behind all the pipes and pumps.

Look this gift horse in the mouth.

Or not. The fly in iNTEL's ointment is their processors. Shoot, they sold Marvell off, so the only thing they have is that segmentation-legacy-laden, energy-sucking x86. (Can't imagine what people see in 'core, other than the theory that, if everyone is crossing on the red light, it seems safer.)

They've got a train to catch...

[krewemaynard]

...don't want to start bleeding all over the seats.

Re:GMA 500!!?

[Narishma]

Ok that's true for 3d. I was thinking more about video performance. It has acceleration for things like VC1, h264... Even in 3d though it is a modern GPU having unified shaders for example, but only a small amount of shader units (4 I think) and a relatively low frequency so yeah it won't be a beast in 3d.

Re:GMA 500!!?

[anss123]

Ok that's true for 3d. I was thinking more about video performance. It has acceleration for things like VC1, h264... Even in 3d though it is a modern GPU having unified shaders for example, but only a small amount of shader units (4 I think) and a relatively low frequency so yeah it won't be a beast in 3d.

Of course, video performance is another ball of yarn. I've never played back video on a GMA 950 so I have no idea how crappy it looks, or how much better the GMA 500 looks, so I'll take your word for it.

Intel caught me on this one too :(

[HRbnjR]

I fell in love with the Poulsbo based Panasonic CF-U1 ruggedized MID. Once I saw Intel did the graphics hardware and that they had a Linux driver, I bought the thing. Knowing Intel has been doing such a great job maintaining their desktop Linux stuff (i810 driver, etc) I just trusted them, and as you can see by this article, what a mistake that turned out to be.

Sounds to me like windows drivers.

[drolli]

Honestly, i am sure this is how many "we have to hit the shelfes before 8am yesterday , because this chipset is now the cheapest one"-drivers for windows are developed. Copy and paste everything into your driver instead of defining the dependencies correctly. After all in the end it is a single dll which may be several megabyte of size, nobody looks into that anyway. Nobidy cares in five year. until that time, recommend to everybody using the recovery CD. If things break by an windows update, it's clearly MS fault, isn't it? BTW. MS never certified the driver, so MS clearly says its the manufacturers fault. Just turn of the acceleration - good luck.

In this game there a now three compnaies involved, all of which want to earn money. And the customers of none of the three companies care right now about this driver issue.

-Dell: Customer is happy with Ubuntu, turned it on, worked. When ubuntu upgrades the kernel, dell will pay the driver developer
-Driver developer: copying and pasting saved some time, specification most likely said: should run on ubuntu. Dell is obviously happy
-Intel: Dell as a customer is happy to buy cheap parts.

Re:Sounds to me like windows drivers.

[Pecisk]

....
-Imagination Technologies: happy as they overburdened-with-IP-licenses tech are used almost everywhere and everyone pays for the hit, because there aren't competition, even from Intel itself

Exactly!

[Xenographic]

> No. Quake is not a game. It is a network performance analyzer.

Do you have a business card? I'm thinking that I should recommend to the boss that we get a contract with some consultants to regularly analyze our network performance in order to find bottlenecks before they become problematic...

any real open source video support for linux?

[drfireman]

Support for video in Linux seems pretty imperiled in general. If you have even slightly complicated needs, it can be a real struggle. If you really want to avoid closed source drivers, you can be out of luck completely. If it weren't for the fact that some heavy hitters like Linux systems, I'd feel like we're only a few shady deals away from Linux no longer having video.

Re:Clued-up?

[janrinok]

On this side of the pond we often use the phrase 'clued-up'. It does, however, mean exactly as you have surmised.

Intel drivers seem to work pretty good to me.

[jovetoo]

Well, I just installed recent Intel drivers om my new Atom 330 machine (with a builtin 945G) and I am pleasantly surprised about stability and performance (both graphics and cpu). It can't compete with my main machine but it does the browse/chat/video thing smoothly.

Re:Intel drivers seem to work pretty good to me.

[OrangeTide]

So you aren't running the GMA 500? Thanks for playing.

same with the mobos

[Trepidity]

The 965 chipset's MTRRs are still broken, after a dozen firmware revisions, but nobody at Intel cares because it only breaks 64-bit Linux with >=4gb of RAM.

Perhaps a stable kernel API might help?

[argent]

With the X.Org Poulsbo driver not being actively maintained, it doesn't even build with the latest Linux packages.

Is this because of changes in the kernel API, or instability at a higher level?

And lest we forget?

[deviated_prevert]

"Microsoft threatening Intel unless they knock off the Linux integration"

What goes on is more behind the scenes and hidden from the general public by the so called Microsoft "Hardware Partner Cartel" For example..When Intel released a Linux compiler that did better 64bit optimization on the Itanium (remember the Itanic) guess what happened to that line of processors.

At the same time AMD started to make inroads into the server market. Now that AMD is also threatening Microsoft with advanced Linux support look at what is happening to them!

You can bet that the DirectX support for this GPU will not have issues but it will take some time for the Linux issues to be resolved. Just enough to make sure that all the OEM offerings on embedded devices that use this GPU will not have a Linux offering. One cannot blame Intel for shying away from Linux when Microsoft can leverage the OEMs to the extent that they can sink companies if they choose.

Welcome to 2009 where money counts more!

[freaker_TuC]

Welcome to 2009, where your vote isn't just depending on money or sales anymore!

Wake up, smell the coffee...
Money runs the world, customer isn't king anymore like it used to be ...
What's one voice against a company these days?
FOSS is just a market segment for them.

I was raised in Poulsbo

[despeaux]

I was raised in Poulsbo