We Have Poulsbo Hardware, But No Driver

[biosflasher]

Why hasn't someone attempted to reverse engineer the binary drivers and the hardware ala the NOVEAU project for NVIDIA?

It's a question of qualification, time and motivation. Find someone who is qualified (very few people), has the time (most of them are already working on nouveau or some other project), and motivation (owns the hardware and wants reasonably fast free graphics).

In the end, your list will be down to maybe one or two persons, and unless they work on it full-time (or can rope in a dozen developers), it is pretty likely the hardware won't be available in shops anymore once they get actual results. Reverse engineering obsolete hardware on such a large scale and writing driver code for it is probably one of the least rewarding tasks ever unless you want to get famous in vintage computer circles. After all, most potential users will have moved on before you can finish it.

OTOH, with nouveau, you have a bunch of qualified developers with some spare time and a strong motivation.

(A few months/years from now, someone will probably do it, but right now I don't see it happening. Growing unemployment may make this happen faster. My magic 8-ball is defective, though.)

[jonwil]

Remember that its not just the Polsburo people who want decent drivers, a lot of people with mobile phones that contain similar PowerVR chips would benefit (and might help in the reverse engineering effort if they can)

But yeah I realize how hard it is.
Still, just getting 100% free 2D would be enough for a lot of people

[jbernardo]

Well, we're in March now and still no driver. Looks like Intel doesn't really care about the idiots that bought a poulsbo netbook.

[gbeauche]

Well, we're in March now and still no driver. Looks like Intel doesn't really care about the idiots that bought a poulsbo netbook.

Intel cares, your netbook vendor probably doesn't... Reminder: the US15W was not meant to be used in netbooks but rather in MIDs or other embedded devices where the end-user is not supposed to upgrade the driver himself.

However, Intel provides regular updates to the US15W driver, that is IEGD (10.3.1). If you need another driver (e.g. PSB), you have to contact your OS or HW vendor, those are supposed to provide you with the drivers, should they care...

[jbernardo]

However, Intel provides regular updates to the US15W driver, that is IEGD (10.3.1). If you need another driver (e.g. PSB), you have to contact your OS or HW vendor, those are supposed to provide you with the drivers, should they care...

First of all, thanks a lot for all your work on libva and mplayer-vaapi. Thanks to you I can watch full hd movies on my netbook.

Second, the IEGD 10.3.1 driver, besides being difficult to install and buggy (no suspend/resume, among other problems), doesn't work with any xorg after 1.6, so it is no good for the latest distros.

Wether Intel wants it or not, the US15W is in quite a few netbooks, so they could at least "do a nvidia" and provide decent binary blobs. And yes, I know that the problems with this chipset aren't restricted to linux, the bad support and bugs are still there for windows.

[descendent87]

Made the mistake of buying a dell mini 10 (with upgraded 720p screen) and now finding out the hard way how bad linux support for poulsbo is. Jolicloud is the only thing I can find that works out the box with it. All others are incredibly slow and force me to use lower resolutions making the screen look terrible. Hoping there's some change to this soon.

[Kano]

I have got no test hardware, but i know that U 9.10 can use psb with a simple ppa.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo/

I tested that using ssh to such a box. Btw. i just added a special psb hack to my mplayer script. Just try it after installing psb (sudo sh scriptname).

http://kanotix.com/files/fix/mplayer-vaapi-latest.txt

Just be patient, the usual cpus on psb hardware are slow as hell.

[descendent87]

Thanks but doesnt look good for the future as this bug was marked "wont fix" https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...sb/+bug/330906
Seems mandriva supports it in the newest version so will have to try that.
Trying to see if it's possible to get the driver working on debian at the moment but fear as it's rolling release (would be using testing possibly sid) each time the kernel's updated everything would break

[Kano]

The "fix" is a 3rd party solution that you read in the wiki. But at least you can use it for video accelleration. Most easy way is to install a distro where a solution is available - it does not matter if it works out of the box. For lenny i could not support it - did not try something newer because i can not test it myself anyway.