Clarifications On Poulsbo's Gallium3D Driver

[Remco]

This is Intel's fault. They accepted crap. I know this, because they are selling crap. Even now, they are trying to trick me into buying useless plastic with their advertisements.

But regardless of whose fault it is, I'm not buying Intel until this Poulsbo hardware is long gone. They can expect me to look at their hardware again in at least 5 years.

[val-gaav]

I don't care much whether my drivers are closed or open. I just want them to be solid.

...and working with a latest Xorg, kernel etc. which is really not possible with any blob. Nvidia is the best here but the support here is also not from day one.

The other thing is legacy drivers as it is now for ATI r100-r500 ... In this case nvidia is once again the best giving updates also for old legaqcy drivers, however for example my riva tnt2 will not work with new Xorg and nvidia blob. Sure it's an old card but it's in a PC that does not need a better card...

Interestingly, in that regard, I think that if all drivers were closed, the kernel developers would be forced to keep stable ABI and APIs.

Here you have Linus opinion about it :

http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showpost.php?p=78838&postcount=78

and here opinion about why having stable ABI and API is not so good idea :

http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.31/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt

[cb88]

Just out of curiosity but will this driver also work for the Pandora(http://openpandora.org/) or is there no arm version of the binaries?

[RoboJ1M]

Yeah, they are like ARM now.
They used to make their own hardware though. (KyroII FTW!!)

I believe I agree with the Most Awesome Dude, I find it very likely that it's just a very slow process getting it all done.

And Imagination are very small, I doubt they have the resources to throw at it like AMD/ATI does.

Oh and, "it's not like there will be any other serious customers for that kind of shitty GPU's, ever".

Imagination are VERY like ARM in that they design embedded GPUs that are very VERY low voltage and you probably already own several in your various mobile phones, PDAs, handheld consoles, etc. They may not make it and sell it to you but their global volumes have to be pretty big these days.

Finally: I'm with the Just Works camp for now. I'll have it working first, open source eventually. Because eventually it will all be open source.

J.

[Kazade]

First of all thanks for the insight.

I never heared of a company called Imagination, but if I was in charge of Imagination I would think twice about not listening to a huge customer like Intel because it's not like there will be any other serious customers for that kind of shitty GPU's, ever.

Imagination Technologies, they (amongst other things) designed the GPU in the Dreamcast. I went for an Interview there (worst interview ever, seriously, I messed up so bad) and I'm glad I didn't get it, it was only afterward that I heard how anti-opensource they are.

Their whole company is based on selling IP to companies like Intel, they don't product any hardware, they just design it.

[zoomblab]

I don't care much whether my drivers are closed or open. I just want them to be solid.

Interestingly, in that regard, I think that if all drivers were closed, the kernel developers would be forced to keep stable ABI and APIs. That in turn would mean that I wouldn't have to pray for everything to work as well as before whenever I have to upgrade to a new distro version. It would also mean that the drivers are developed by the same entity that made the hardware in the first place and not some random guy from another organization.

[Kano]

When you sum it up, the only opensource parts are the DRM and and the 2d driver. I guess they think thats enough to push the DRM mainline

[rohcQaH]

makes me wonder why intel used those GPUs in the first place, if driver support is aproblem. Why didn't they install their own GPUs?

[V!NCENT]

I don't work for Intel.

Intel has always intended to release open-source drivers for this chipset; they've been working behind closed doors for months upon months trying to get Imagination to release docs. The Poulsbo situation may be several heaping gobs of shit, but Intel's been working hard to increase the documented-code-to-shit ratio. Blaming them for this shit is taking a simple and untrue view of the situation.

First of all thanks for the insight.

I never heared of a company called Imagination, but if I was in charge of Imagination I would think twice about not listening to a huge customer like Intel because it's not like there will be any other serious customers for that kind of shitty GPU's, ever.

[MostAwesomeDude]

I don't work for Intel.

Intel has always intended to release open-source drivers for this chipset; they've been working behind closed doors for months upon months trying to get Imagination to release docs. The Poulsbo situation may be several heaping gobs of shit, but Intel's been working hard to increase the documented-code-to-shit ratio. Blaming them for this shit is taking a simple and untrue view of the situation.