Valve & Intel Collaborating On Open-Source Drivers

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like Valve's Linux team that's still growing has found much interest in open-source graphics drivers. Intel Linux graphics driver developers and Valve's Linux team were meeting for the past week to look at each other's code, work out performance goals, and collaborate on new features. Ian Romanick of Intel blogs, 'The funny thing is Valve guys say the same thing about drivers. There were a couple times where we felt like they were trying to convince us that open source drivers are a good idea. We had to remind them that they were preaching to the choir. :) Their problem with closed drivers (on all platforms) is that it's such a blackbox that they have to play guess-and-check games. There's no way for them to know how changing a particular setting will affect the performance. If performance gets worse, they have no way to know why. If they can see where time is going in the driver, they can make much more educated guesses.' Perhaps the companies are paying attention to Linus Torvalds' memo to NVIDIA?"

Comments

Re:yeah right

[Kjella]

If Intel gives a shit about open source graphics drivers, where are the open drivers for their Atom IGP?

Licensed from PowerVR so not their IP, but next year it looks like they'll replace it with their in-house Ivy Bridge graphics in the "Valley View" Atoms. But if you got an Atom today and want good open source support, you're shit out of luck.

Re:yeah right

[HarrySquatter]

You don't need to download them from anywhere. They are in the mainline kernel.