Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Well, There Is No i8xx Fix For Ubuntu 10.10

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Well, There Is No i8xx Fix For Ubuntu 10.10

    Phoronix: Well, There Is No i8xx Fix For Ubuntu 10.10

    Back in July we reported on a GEM-free UMS Intel driver coming about that was targeted for owners of vintage Intel 8xx series hardware to circumvent the stability issues and other problems they commonly have encountered since switching to Intel's newer driver stack with kernel mode-setting and the Graphics Execution Manager. Canonical hoped to ship this UMS code-path in Ubuntu 10.10 that would then be enabled for those with these older Intel integrated graphics processors...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    We are talking about a decade old hardware here... The few people who are still using this hardware do not care for gpu accelaration anyway...

    Comment


    • #3
      The KMS blacklist patches were in the Maverick kernel some days ago already, IIRC.

      Also, I definitely care if my laptop can or can not play video (XV!).

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by TemplarGR View Post
        We are talking about a decade old hardware here... The few people who are still using this hardware do not care for gpu accelaration anyway...
        Not that they did offer much GPU acceleration anyways.

        Ubuntu should really find a solution though. If the shadowfb thing works then I'd expect them to use that. That way they can at least get the video modes users need. The VESA standard only covers 'standard' resolutions and often laptop displays do not use those.

        Also with good modesetting support that allows a work-around for playing video without XV. The X11 software scaling is expensive, but if you put your resolution down to something like 640x480 (or whatever the ratio is needed for your display) then you can get nearly full screen video playback with DVD-sized videos with relatively little cpu usage.

        Comment


        • #5
          i915 is broken too

          The Intel driver shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 Beta also breaks i915 hardware for me. Mostly after suspend/resume video overlay breaks completely, 2D drawing has serious artifacts (wrong colors etc.) and after an X.Org restart the Ubuntu friendly recovery stuff comes up. A full reboot is needed to fix it.

          This issue was already present for most of the development cycle.

          Intel only manufactures a small range of graphics chipsets, and they can't even seem to reliably support five year old hardware. At the same time we have perfectly good open-source support for Radeon R300 chips -introduced in 2002. So AMD supports chipsets which were manufactured BEFORE it bought ATI.

          Comment


          • #6
            All my desktop hardware with these chips have failed. Blacklisting is actually a good idea because if you put in a video 'card' without blacklisting, then the intel drivers can conflict and cause X not to load and so on.

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by TemplarGR View Post
              We are talking about a decade old hardware here... The few people who are still using this hardware do not care for gpu accelaration anyway...
              Where could you possibly have come up with that complete absurdity from? If the owners of such hardware cared for GPU acceleration back when the hardware was new, then why should they care for it any less now that the hardware is a little older? The functionality of the hardware doesn't vanish as it ages... it stays with it forever. Why should users of said hardware accept that the functionality of that hardware becomes LESS as the software "advances"?

              Not everyone needs to be able to play the newest 3D games. Most people's need for GPU acceleration is much more modest than that... a little video playback, 2D scrolling, maybe some light 3D compositing, google earth, etc.

              But sending them back to vesa? That is just plain painful.

              If I were ubuntu, I would do what I suspect they are planning.... DEFAULT to vesa, but also provide other options that the users can try out if they want to. May not work perfectly for everyone, but should at least be good for some.

              Comment


              • #8
                Personally, I think Intel should fork the driver. Make a version that only supports i8xx chipsets with KMS and a restricted version of GEM that doesn't move things around (i.e. it exposes the location of the framebuffer and reserves a memory pool for the old-fashioned memory-allocation code to use). The 2D rendering code would probably be based on the old EXA code. I don't know how feasible this is, but it doesn't seem like too much work, and it should at least get us 2D acceleration with nice modesetting.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by TemplarGR View Post
                  We are talking about a decade old hardware here... The few people who are still using this hardware do not care for gpu accelaration anyway...
                  Funny... I bought this machine in around 2006, and it plays video and performs well in most office/email/media functions. It can almost do basic 3d as well... (ie, can for a while before locking up)

                  Why do people insist on talking on others behalves, especially when it appears they are quite mis-informed.

                  Anyhow... my stable setup has always come from additional tweaks post install and came by running newer code than 10.04, so I'm curious if that suggests 10.10 (the beta) will work out of the box for me (before they disable the default driver paths for the final release)

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    You obviously did not take the point...

                    I did not say that just because hardware is old, it should have functionality removed.

                    I said, that if you are still using such hardware, your use case certainly doesn't include anything which requires its limited gpu accelaretion...


                    What part of it some of you do not understand?

                    Comment

                    Working...
                    X