Intel Can't Ship Their Own Driver With Their MeeGo OS

[DavidH]

I'm new on these forums, and at this website. I followed a news link from ArsTechnica's home page. I am also a Macintosh user, not a Linux user. I do, however, have a MS in Computer Science from some years ago.

I simply cannot understand the first paragraph of the article, although I'd like to. Would it be possible to have it edited by someone whose first language is English, who can construct sentences at least at the 8th-grade level, and who hasn't been awake for 28 hours straight?

The first sentence, if I can call it that, is particularly bad. If it was intended to give an outsider a background introduction, it fails miserably. I'm very disappointed.

Sorry to have to say this in my first post. Hope to be more positive in future posts.

David H.

[Svartalf]

I'm new on these forums, and at this website. I followed a news link from ArsTechnica's home page. I am also a Macintosh user, not a Linux user. I do, however, have a MS in Computer Science from some years ago.

I simply cannot understand the first paragraph of the article, although I'd like to. Would it be possible to have it edited by someone whose first language is English, who can construct sentences at least at the 8th-grade level, and who hasn't been awake for 28 hours straight?

The first sentence, if I can call it that, is particularly bad. If it was intended to give an outsider a background introduction, it fails miserably. I'm very disappointed.

Sorry to have to say this in my first post. Hope to be more positive in future posts.

David H.

Heh... It *was* atrocious...Michael, you might want to fix that first part.

I didn't read the article because I'm kind-of following the saga a little more directly for business reasons.

Basically speaking, Intel, until it released the Poulsbo chipset used for Atom based mobile devices, had been providing adequate, though not stellar 2D and 3D support for Linux.

With the GMA500, used in the Poulsbo chipset, they licensed and rebranded a low-power core from a third party, Imagination Technologies, developer of the PowerVR GPU line. Because of this, Intel couldn't provide an open source driver for this IGP like the previous mobile and desktop chipsets. Worse, they had difficulties producing a serviceable driver until recently for that chipset- on either Linux OR Windows.

Sadly, even with the properly functioning driver, they can't provide access to the driver to use on a Poulsbo or similar platform without an NDA signed by the recipient of the driver. In a nutshell, they produced this lovely Linux based distribution for handhelds and they can't deliver the same with full support for their hardware because of this small bit of what could probably be called short-sightedness.

By the way, welcome to the forums and to the site. :-D

[RussDill]

"The Intel Poulsbo DRM was open-source, but it was rejected from the mainline Linux kernel since the user-space X.Org Poulsbo driver remained a binary blob."

Small correction - the basic X driver itself is not in fact a binary blob. Interestingly, you can actually get basic 2D functionality on the GMA 500 using entirely F/OSS components; you only need the kernel module and the X driver, both of which are open. The binary blobs are psb-firmware and xpsb-glx, which are required for 3D acceleration and vaapi video playback acceleration functionality.

(I think this may not have been entirely understood by the kernel folks when they were considering whether or not to merge the kernel module, but it doesn't change the fact that both kernel module and X driver are messily maintained. Or, these days, apparently not maintained at all).

I'm losing track of how many GMA 500 / GMA 600 drivers Intel actually has, now. I think it's at least 3, possibly 4. This thread makes for hilarious / tragic reading:

http://bugs.meego.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2205

Where are the open 2d components downloadable from?

[tripzero]

Would you really choose to buy a phone or MP3 player which requires you to first download video drivers before you can use it?

Proprietary drivers are OK for home users installing on a laptop, but for embedded systems if the driver can't be shipped with the device, then it's useless.

Android and Maemo phones have binary/closed drivers. Binary/closed drivers are a part of life right now in embedded devices. Also, MeeGo is a reference distro not an actual product. It's up to the OEM to take MeeGo, productize it and put it on hardware. When they do, they'll likely include any closed drivers they need to make their hardware work.

When you take meego and install it on your hardware, you are responsible for that hardware and supporting it.

[gbeauche]

Android and Maemo phones have binary/closed drivers. Binary/closed drivers are a part of life right now in embedded devices. Also, MeeGo is a reference distro not an actual product. It's up to the OEM to take MeeGo, productize it and put it on hardware. When they do, they'll likely include any closed drivers they need to make their hardware work.

When you take meego and install it on your hardware, you are responsible for that hardware and supporting it.

Exactly. Some people said how bad Intel was with their chips policy. It turns out they failed to segment the chips market as people supposed. i.e. some HW vendors seem to have been able to make Netbooks with Atom Zxx + US15W whereas this wasn't intended use... thus, it's the responsibility of the OEM to provide the drivers and sign the necessary contracts with Intel. Intel doesn't HAVE to provide the embedded drivers to the whole public. However, they do so because they try to play nice anyway. Have you ever seen video drivers updates publicly available for your phone or other ARM-based devices, in particular those based on PowerVR chips? Or even sources to those drivers? Why don't people understand "embedded"?

[gbeauche]

In particular, can someone provide links to drivers at the chip's vendor website for the following netbooks?
- Qualcomm: Compaq Airlife 100 for Snapdragon drivers, including the OpenMAX IL components for video decoding acceleration?
- NVIDIA: Toshiba AC-100 for Tegra 2 drivers, including the OpenMAX IL components for video decoding acceleration?

Better, would you have sources to any of those?

[droidhacker]

You're kind of missing the point.
Fact is that nobody *has* to provide *any* drivers to *anyone* for *anything*.

** but if your customers REQUIRE it, then you end up not selling your stuff due to being impossible to use. This is why drivers get made and distributed. Just because they don't *HAVE* to doesn't mean that it isn't in their BEST INTERESTS to do so.

Now the good news about the world as it is changing today is that we are starting to see some embedded devices where there is a very real need for the hardware vendors to not just provide drivers, but to provide OPEN drivers. One of these platforms is meego, another much bigger platform, which is starting to become really well known is ANDROID. These platforms are really changing the embedded market from what was originally the "somevendor's_proprietary_junk_firmware" market into a "this_is_a_general_purpose_computer and i_should_be_able_to_do_what_i_want_with_it" market. The fact that hardware vendors are putting things like poulsbo and maybe soon moorestown into some fairly general purpose netbooks and tablets is the other side of this coin -- so not only are the software platforms pushing embedded into the non-embedded market, the hardware itself is now strong enough that what would otherwise be considered embedded hardware actually *can be* used quite successfully in devices that previously wouldn't be considered for embedded.

In other words.... the word "embedded" is really losing its meaning. If I own something, I really should be able to do anything I want with it, and if the hardware vendor doesn't support me in that, then I might just go to a different vendor.

AMD if you're reading this, NOW is the time to get into the ultra mobile market. With open specs and drivers, you'll make a KILLING.

[vgrade]

Meego on O2 Jogger (GMA500) EMGD Driver

I've been paying with the new EMGD driver on my Joggler there may be some hope for all the GMA500 users !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnwfVtHuhoI

[vgrade]

I've been paying with the new EMGD driver on my Joggler there may be some hope for all the GMA500 users !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnwfVtHuhoI

Instructions and prebuit .img on

http://jogglerwiki.info/index.php?title=MeeGo

[gbeauche]

I've been paying with the new EMGD driver on my Joggler there may be some hope for all the GMA500 users !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnwfVtHuhoI

EMGD now uses the whole OpenGL stack from PowerVR. The drivers also contain OpenGL ES 2.x & OpenVG support. X.org 1.8 and DRI2 are supported and this can also work with Maverick's 2.6.35 kernel. The driver is in GOLD state, so public builds should happen in less than one month, IMHO.