Matthew Garrett ([info]mjg59) wrote,
@ 2009-10-28 14:01:00
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Entry tags:advogato, fedora

More GMA500
But is Intel really the party at fault, here?

For shipping a gpu without open drivers? Given that the alternatives involve someone else designing, fabbing and releasing a piece of hardware under Intel's name without being sued in the process, I'm going to have to say "Yes".

(Note that while Moblinzone.com is a website owned by Intel, the writers don't appear to be Intel employees)


(4 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Not to mention...
[info]adamwill
2009-10-28 06:29 pm UTC (link)
...that the article is hopelessly inaccurate. It suggests that the use of PowerVR hardware 'requires' closed source drivers, as if this were some unalterable law of nature rather than a completely discretionary decision on Intel's part as to how the drivers in question should be developed. (The PowerVR hardware didn't come along with existing closed source drivers; Intel contracted out the development of the drivers, after picking the hardware).

Even worse, it keeps banging on about the kernel, when the kernel module part of the psb driver is open source and can be (and has been) quite easily kept working on multiple kernel releases (I have it working on 2.6.31 for Fedora; Olivier Blin has it working on 2.6.31 for Mandriva; the Ubuntu community has it working on 2.6.31 for Ubuntu 9.10). The closed parts of the psb driver are X libraries, the DRI driver, and the libva video playback acceleration driver.

(I know you know this stuff, Matt, just mentioning it for your readers).

(Reply to this) (Thread)
Re: Not to mention...
(Anonymous)
2009-10-30 01:41 am UTC (link)
That the use of PowerVR hardware 'requires' closed source drivers is actually true in a way. ImgTec is an incredibly closed company. Linux drivers for earlier generations of hardware (Series 3/Kyro) were proprietary too, and were not updated for newer kernels any more after some point. Hey you can use them with Debian Sarge still.

So anyone buying hardware with PowerVR IP inside should have expected this.

Nothing Intel can do at this time, except maybe buying the company.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]sweh
2009-10-28 06:30 pm UTC (link)
The core concept of their argument is wrong anyway. People do want to mess around with embedded Linux devices (routers, PDAs, A/V boxes... even the firmware on my TV is Linux, and people are hacking away at it). They use "toaster" as an example; umm yeah....

There may be "little expectation" that people will want to modify things, but there's definitely a non-zero requirement; especially on devices which are networked (why, yes, let's run with a 5 year old kernel with known vulns in the network stack, and stick a wifi card on it...)

Intel aren't solely to blame, but they have their share.

(Reply to this)

Intel
(Anonymous)
2009-10-29 09:14 am UTC (link)
are the problem here - I've seen Imagination's own PowerVR SGX drivers running on Windows and Linux OS on various netbooks and the performance is incredible - 4 windows running different video streams while also running another on an external screen - using <12% CPU load. No judders, no video nasties, just super smooth display.

The decision to restrict the drivers is entirely down to Intel - presumably they want to keep selling PowerVR cores into smaller screen devices and using their own solution for larger screen devices. Entirely down to cost issues for the two different versions of the Atom chips.

(Reply to this)

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