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Intel Releases Ivy Bridge Programming Docs Under CC License

Posted by timothy on from the buncha-commies dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Ivy Bridge graphics processor from Intel is now fully documented under the Creative Commons. Intel released four volumes of documents (2400+ pages) covering their latest graphics core as a complete programming guide with register specifications. Included with the graphics documentation is their new execution unit and video engine."

26 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Captain Obvious Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    nVidia should have bit the bullet and done the same thing. Could have benefited them financially and boosted consumer satisfaction.

    1. Re:Captain Obvious Here by lobiusmoop · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And Broadcom too, while we're at it - it's not as if we're asking for the schematics to copy the chips, just some low-level api information would be nice for OSS driver development.

      --
      "I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
    2. Re:Captain Obvious Here by rrohbeck · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yup, to the tune of a couple 100 million: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNTE

      --
      thegodmovie.com - watch it
    3. Re:Captain Obvious Here by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      Broadcom is a highly profitable and successful company. You could argue what they're doing is financially beneficial.

      The argument "we must be doing it right because we're making money" works great right up until the point you realize somebody did it better and passed you by.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  2. Take that you morons at nVidia! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you won't allow us to write software for your crappy cards, then they'll be no software for your cards. I don't understand why these Microsoft-style closed source morons always think not allowing people to use what they sell will help them. They're letting their paranoia get in the way of good business.

    1. Re:Take that you morons at nVidia! by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I don't understand why these Microsoft-style closed source morons always think not allowing people to use what they sell will help them.

      You're asking a question about market behavior, but the problem isn't a market problem (what you say makes sense, in a free market). Since the expected market behaviors don't exist, you have to ask, "why is this market broken?"

      The standard answer is that they're violating thousands of patents six ways to Sunday, and the more open they are about their hardware the more risk they expose on these being found out.

      Of course all the manufacturers are doing it because the patent system is so screwed up and the product would be impractical otherwise. People get grants on the obvious and necessary techniques all the time. And it's not just the big three where they could cross-license - there are trolls out there who just want to be parasites on the successful shops.

      As usual, this is social engineering run amok. Yes, the reason you can't have good video drivers for linux is because the government has screwed up this market too. Take away this patent morass, and the vendors become interested in selling cards any way they can. Of course, the smartest-kids-in-the-room will now chime in and say that there simply wouldn't be any good video cards without the government getting involved. You decide which acutally makes sense.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    2. Re:Take that you morons at nVidia! by dave420 · · Score: 2

      They are often stopped by licensing issues when attempting to open source parts of their systems. That's the world we live in today - stamping your feet because they brought you some of the highest-performing hardware in modern PCs seems pretty childish.

    3. Re:Take that you morons at nVidia! by lightknight · · Score: 2

      Fascinating idea. I thought the main issue was that some of their OpenGl code was licensed to them, and that license was non-transferable.

      --
      I am John Hurt.
    4. Re:Take that you morons at nVidia! by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They don't need opengl code to release hardware documentation... Given appropriate documentation, people could implement a clean room version of opengl and replace the bits that can't be released. There are already several open source implementations of opengl which could be adapted.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    5. Re:Take that you morons at nVidia! by VortexCortex · · Score: 2

      I agree. Let's ditch the patent system. It's the only rational, logical thing to do. I mean, if you think that the Patent System is good, then I call bullshit until you test the damn hypothesis already. It's not like we can't re-enact whatever crap laws we want.

      I can hear it now: "If you get rid of copyrights and patents NO ONE WILL INNOVATE"... Well, please explain how the fashion and car industries are doing so well without these protections?
      FUDsters gonna FUD...

      It's time we did the damned experiment, abolish patents AND copyrights. Times have changed! We're in the INFORMATION AGE now. I fear most people grossly underestimate the power of reverse engineers... Besides: "May the Best Copier Win!" has been the battle cry of life itself for billions of years. Only now we place restrictions on the flow of information? Look, as much as I liked that Planet of the Apes movie, I don't want it to come true.

  3. Good news! by tramp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And a showstopper for those other graphic card makers (AMD/NVIDIA) with their halfbaked support for Linux.

    1. Re:Good news! by GrumpyOldMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      Nvidia's "half baked" support is actually better, since their drivers are backported to older stable distros. Stuff that requires kernel or bleeding-edge X.org is a royal pain to make work on a box running an older distro.

  4. Re:First Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I would've got first post, but I'm still reading TFA. Only two thousand pages to go...

  5. Link to documentation by Nukenin · · Score: 5, Informative

    The documentation referenced is available from Intel Linux Graphics: Documentation.

  6. That's a lot of information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We've come a long way since the 47 registers and paltry documentation of the Commodore 64's 6567 video chip. My question is, who can actually master these modern systems before they are obsolete? No one person, I think, can gobble 2400 pages of documentation to work with a graphics system. Are people now merely specialists of one tiny subset of a system, never to understand what is going on overall? That might explain why we need 600M device drivers these days.

    1. Re:That's a lot of information by Lorien_the_first_one · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's what makes the release of Intell's documentation under a CC license so logical. A group or even a confederation of groups working to develop a good driver can really make use of the docs. This can also make far more sense for Intel as they don't have build a driver for every purpose that their chips can be applied to. If anyone could afford to release documentation like this, without worrying about exposure to patents (as one other poster noted), that would be Intel. They're big enough to defend against most suits without going bankrupt.

      I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of this.

      --
      The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
  7. *Not* the first public release of information by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a release of a large and very complete set of formal documents, but open source driver code (GPL'd and part of the mainline Linux kernel) has been released under a public development process since just after Sandy Bridge first came out in preparation for the Ivy Bridge launch. This code is written by paid Intel employees.

    Incidentally, large portions of the DRM infrastructure in the kernel *and* the X server *and* the upcoming Wayland project are all being made by paid Intel employees. Note that this development work also has major benefits to the open-source AMD driver development and we would all be better off if AMD (not to mention Nvidia) adopted Intel's approach to paying people for open-source work.

    In a similar manner, there is already 100% GPL'd code that is available for the next-generation Haswell graphics engines. Obviously at this stage it isn't complete, but things are not hidden behind closed doors and, just like Ivy Bridge, there should be solid launch-day support for the Haswell IGP. Considering the rumours going around about the extra resources that Haswell will offer for the GPU, this could chip could provide very solid launch-day out-of-the-box graphics support in notebooks and other devices that don't require a dicrete GPU.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:*Not* the first public release of information by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Informative

      P.S. --> To anyone who saw "DRM" in the previous post and had a heart attack... DRM here means Direct Rendering Manager and is the Linux infrastructure that lets you access the GPU for graphics acceleration.

      --
      AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  8. A good start... but Intel graphics still need work by JDG1980 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is a good thing - it means that open-source drivers can now be written that will be adequate for most users. Unless you are doing heavy 3D gaming or HTPC, Intel's products are fine.

    For HTPC, Intel would be a great choice if only they'd finally fix that lingering 23.976 FPS bug. They just don't seem to be taking it that seriously, though, since it's existed since the G45 days at least. Also, I don't know if this is supported through the registers (even the documents may not make it clear) but it would be great to have real YCbCr 4:2:2 output – AMD cards claim to do this, but they are actually converting the data from YCbCr (on DVD/Blu-Ray) to RGB and then back to YCbCr for output. Allowing source-direct YCbCr output (which currently only dedicated SoCs can do) and fixing the 23.976 FPS problems would make Intel-based HTPCs a viable option at the high end. (Advanced videophiles want to use a dedicated scaler device, which offers much better scaling and/or deinterlacing results than what software and average standalone players can do.)

  9. The actual documents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Direct link without the Phoronix fluff:

    http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html

  10. The Rest of the Story by happy_place · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...by releasing their documentation under the Creative Commons license, Intel saved enough money in lawyer fees to purchase a new fab...

    --
    http://www.beanleafpress.com
  11. Re:Intel Graphics Still Sucks by ifiwereasculptor · · Score: 2

    Well, both Intel and Linux have come a long way since the Pentium 4 era, so I don't think it's fair to use a 10-year-old chipset as an example to avoid Intel GPUs now. Is also isn't fair comparing a 2002 iGPU to a 2007 iGPU. Of course the 7025 still works and is supported - it's much newer. My 2003 FX card, however, won't render anything GTK3 properly, it's completely abandoned by Nvidia and a very low priority for nouveau developers.

  12. Re:why is this news? by Tapewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Intel publishes ( for free ) nearly all their architecture documents. It's been their business model since the beginning... how else would the X86 platform exist?

    Someone clearly fell asleep in the 1990s, when Intel were so terrified of the V86 extensions being copied by AMD that they wouldn't tell anyone except Microsoft how they worked. People actually reverse-engineered it and released their own documentation before Intel was willing to allow things like Linux DOSEMU to use it. This did not endear me to Intel back in the day.

    Indeed, an interesting relic from that era is my Turbo Assembler 5 manual. It has a number of blank entries in it for Pentium instructions, e.g.
    RDTSC (Proprietary instruction. Contact Intel for more Information.") - Turbo Assembler Quick Reference, p.118

  13. Phoronix by Narishma · · Score: 2

    Man, it seems like every other sentence in that article is a link to another Phoronix article. I count 14 Phoronix links in there, and the actual link to the Intel docs is buried in the middle of that.
    http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  14. Re:AFAIK AMD has FOSS devs on payroll... by CajunArson · · Score: 2

    That's a great press release and AMD is better than Nvidia since AMD does publish at least partial documentation.. *but*... support for newer AMD cards in the open source drivers has major issues. As of right now, the 7 series cards that have been out for over 6 months have basically no support under the open source drivers. The 6 series and older cards are improving, but Catalyst is still leagues ahead in OpenGL performance and support. The documentation for the AMD cards is not release until months after the cards ship, and there is basically zero open-source development done prior to launch, so there is a long lead time between the cards being available and the cards being usable in any form under Linux (except through Catalyst, which has its own issues).

    One big issue is that the Mesa & open source graphics stack has just recently even gotten support for OpenGL 3.0. The standards support under the proprietary Nvidia & AMD cards is, ironically, far ahead of the open source implementations.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
  15. You cannot share what you do not own by fragMasterFlash · · Score: 2

    Intel has enough hardware developers that the don't typically need to license third party IP to get the job done. Many silicon vendors don't have that luxury and cannot risk incidental leaks of IP details for which they could be held liable. Lets see how much documentation Intel releases for the Atom smartphone chips with PowerVR GPUs.