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Lots of Changes for Intel Graphics Coming in Linux 3.9
With the Linux 3.8 merge over, the Intel Linux graphics developers are looking toward 3.9. From a weblog entry by one of them: "Let's first look at bit at the drm core changes: The headline item this time around is the reworked kernel modeset locking. Finally the kernel doesn't stall for a few frames while probing outputs in the background! ... For general robustness of our GEM implementation we've clarified the various gpu reset state transitions. This should prevent applications from crashing while a gpu reset is going on due to the kernel leaking that transitory state to userspace. Ville Syrjälä also started to fix up our handling of pageflips across gpu hangs so that compositors no longer get stuck after a reset. Unfortunately not all of his patches made it into 3.9. Somewhat related is Mika Kuoppala's work to fix bugs across the seqnqo wrap-around. And to make sure that those bugs won't pop up again he also added some testing infrastructure. "
The thing I am most looking forward to is the gen4 relocation regression finally being fixed. No more GPU hangs when under heavy I/O load (the bane of my existence for a while now). The bug report is a good read if you think hunting for a tricky bug is fun.
The merge for 3.8 isn't just over, it has already been released.
New things are always on the horizon
can I buy an intel video card yet?
Intel briefly sold a discrete gpu back in the early days of agp but it was a failure in the market and since then they seem to have decided to sell their GPU techology as an integrated component of their platform (previously in the northbridge, now in the CPU).
Currently, when I look in store I really only see one vendor.
Your stores must suck, both NVIDIA and ATI are readilly available round here.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
GPU resets:
"Other ideas for troubleshooting:"
{list not quoted}
"I wouldn't pin this problem on Microsoft. Ultimately, this crash is due to game/software developers
and graphics card manufacturers (such as ATI/AMD and NVidia) developing buggy devices and software
and not playing by the rules and standards dictated for a specific platform like Windows. There are
many cases of similar events happening on UNIX/Linux systems, so this problem is not specifically isolated to Windows."
The above is a quote from http://mikemstech.blogspot.com/2011/12/troubleshooting-0x116-videotdrerror.html
a site I have nothing to do with; just a google result that helped me out one time.
then you clearly don't know much about the Linux kernel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager
"Direct Rendering Manager", or "Direct Rendering Module".