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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
I think they'd take over the linux graphics-card market. Maybe not much of a market now, but potentially could be big enough to justify doing it.
Currently, when I look in store I really only see one vendor.
I hope you mean two vendors: AMD and Nvidia. Many motherboards have onboard video by Intel. So, there ya go.
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
Since Vista, the Windows OS deals with this by chatting with the graphics,
if the graphics doesn't reply in a reasonable amount of time the OS will reset the program.
Playing an intensive game like Battle Field 3 this tends to happen a lot. The video
card is too busy and doesn't have the time to chat; so the game just goes away.
Your either at your desktop like nothing is wrong other than not playing a game anymore,
or staring at the last graphics frame shown with a hard reset in your future.
VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE is what one error calls itself and fixed by disabling the "Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR)."
Key added here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers then disabled.
I have a write up about this in my journal but it's not worth reading, it's wordy and doesn't flow a bit. .DMP file that managed to be written before the OS
A better write up is here http://mikemstech.blogspot.com/2011/12/troubleshooting-0x116-videotdrerror.html
a site I found after running a debug on the one (single)
became unresponsive.
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".
You need to stop blaming Windows and/or the GPU vendor and troubleshoot your system. My GPU has reset precisely zero times when playing BF3, over a total of about 107 hours. I have seen GPU resets on my system on rare occasion, generally with broken software, but never in BF3 and I have more than a bit of testing with it.
You have something wrong on your system, you should figure out what.
And I only see AMD/ATI by choice because I know with an nVidia graphics chip there is no hope of an open source driver coming from then. Guess we both are voting with our wallets. Your vote is for "please me now", my vote is for "please me forever".
Presumably the article refers to Direct Rendering Management and not Digital Rights Management. Any clue what GEM they are talking about? Unless it's a revival of Digital Research's GEM -- the alternate windowing platform that Ventura Publisher used to use. Article authors: Please expand acronyms with the first usage.
I hate to say it but Nvidia is making it happen now. They've managed to make installing graphics drivers totally painless. Hell it's easier than Windows! I'd love an open source driver that works but unfortunately I can choose AMD and have shitty graphics speed or I can fly with Nvidia. My religion just isn't strong enough.