Intel Begins Lining Up Graphics Changes For Linux 3.11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Begins Lining Up Graphics Changes For Linux 3.11

While the Linux 3.10 kernel is only mid-way through its development cycle, the Intel Open-Source Technology Center has already begun piling up many changes they would like merged for their DRM graphics driver into Linux 3.11...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM4MDc

[Krysto]

Wake me up when Intel supports OpenGL 4.3, which will probably be 3 years from now, after OpenGL 5.0 is already released and AMD and Nvidia are already supporting it.

[Linuxhippy]

??

- FBC (Frame-Buffer Compression) support for Haswell. Frame-buffer compression support can lead to letting the CPU/GPU rest longer.

Can you elaborate on this?

[0xBADCODE]

Linux 3.11 ... windows for workgroups rolls in it's grave .

[0xBADCODE]

Wake me up when Intel supports OpenGL 4.3, which will probably be 3 years from now, after OpenGL 5.0 is already released and AMD and Nvidia are already supporting it.

Unlike amd and nvidia, Intel implements things as opensource driver and it causes far less troubles compared to proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers are inherently alien crap in opensource system and they tend to cause troubles in many edge cases. Say, if you installed proprietary driver from MFR's web site and then dare to try to upgrade your OS version so kernel, xorg and so on are uplifted in version, it's really easy to end up with non-working video output which isn't very easy and user friendly to fix, to say the least. Just because new kernel and xorg are not warranted to be suitable for older modules and drivers you had. Their devs simply don't care what would happen to proprietary drivers.This never happens with opensource drivers as they're native part of system and suppplied versions have to work together (unless OS maintainers are complete nuts).

[mendieta]

What I don't see, so far, either on my own testing or phoronix testing, is _any_ performance improvement in Haswell in 3.11 (as compared to 3.10). The next wave of optimizations for Haswell seem to be lining up for a later kernel, maybe 3.12?

Cheers!

[mendieta]

Just a little update. I upgraded into Kubuntu 11.10 beta. A bit of a flop because I forgot to purge the xorg-edgers ppa. Basically, some packages refused to install, KWin being one of them, good thing i always keep a few extra desktops installed, such as openbox, lxde, etc. Performance is the same, since I was already using kernel 3.10.x (compiled from source) and mesa 9.2

Today I tried kernel 3.12.rc1 but 3d performance is 12% lower as per gpumark2, so I reverted to the ubuntu 11.10 kernel. Oh, overclocking is still a disaster in 3.12 (it works actually much worse, see run labeled OC)

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1309160-MEND-130914136