Intel Poulsbo Driver Running On Fedora

While Intel can be applauded for their open-source work on the xf86-video-intel driver and related components of their Linux driver stack that supports their mainline GMA integrated graphics processors, the driver for their GMA 500 found in select netbooks is a bloody mess. There are binary-only bits within the Poulsbo driver stack, their DDX module is developed outside of the X.Org community and can be hard to even find the driver's package, and it just does not work well.

There was even a Poulsbo DRM module that was proposed for integration into the mainline Linux kernel, but that component was denied for inclusion at this time. The Poulsbo Linux situation has been a mess for months with no real changes. With Ubuntu 8.04 LTS there is a Poulsbo driver available to users, but it's really hard to find such support in other Linux distributions. The newer versions of Ubuntu at times haven't even had the support.

Thanks to the work of Adam Williamson, a Red Hat employee and frustrated Pouslbo chipset user, there is now some Poulsbo support in Fedora. Adam has got the xf86-video-psb driver up and running on Fedora Rawhide. So that others can now use this Intel driver, Adam has created libdrm-poulsbo, psb-kmod, psb-firmware, xpsb-glx, and xorg-x11-drv-psb packages.

When using these packages it should be possible to mode-set with this driver, but 3D acceleration is broken. 2D video playback acceleration requires building a special version of MPlayer. More information and details on setting up the Intel Poulsbo driver on Fedora can be found on Adam's blog.