Intel Just Released A Crazy Fast Acceleration Architecture

[slander]

Hello all, I am new here.

I am a complete Linux noob, and have been running fully-updated Ubuntu 10.04 x64 as my secondary OS on my Core2Duo laptop, which has Intel 4 series graphics chipset. Am I going to see the benefits of this anytime soon? Thanks to all who reply!

[allquixotic]

No, these updates will never hit Ubuntu 10.04, or anything earlier than 12.04 or 12.10, for that matter.

Ubuntu has a policy of only doing minor bugfix and critical security updates on distros after they've been released. Of course they make an exception to this for software that Canonical writes, because Canonical engineers never write software with bugs.

Anyway, if you ever want to take advantage of a more modern graphics stack (the one on 10.04 is extremely outdated by now), use the latest release of a distro. As a general rule, Fedora keeps more up-to-date than Ubuntu does. But even so, Ubuntu 11.04 has a whole year's worth of graphics development goodness that 10.04 lacks.

[slander]

Thank you for your reply. I am on a LTS-to-LTS strategy here (not that I have any reason to be, but still). Is there no way I will see this on 10.04? Perhaps by updating to the latest kernel, or the latest drivers?

Thanks again!

[bwat47]

Thank you for your reply. I am on a LTS-to-LTS strategy here (not that I have any reason to be, but still). Is there no way I will see this on 10.04? Perhaps by updating to the latest kernel, or the latest drivers?

Thanks again!

https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

Thats really the only way to get bleeding edge driver stuff in ubuntu, and they say they won't be supporting pre-natty releases anymore, so you may be out of luck on 10.04. (10.04 is ancient in linux-years lol)

[allquixotic]

Thank you for your reply. I am on a LTS-to-LTS strategy here (not that I have any reason to be, but still). Is there no way I will see this on 10.04? Perhaps by updating to the latest kernel, or the latest drivers?

Thanks again!

1. If you have no particular reason to be on an LTS-to-LTS, then don't be. Especially for a desktop where you care about open source graphics drivers. Ubuntu LTS releases and other less-frequently-updated distros (CentOS, RHEL, SLED, Debian Stable, Slackware) are simply years out of date compared to the latest fixes and features in the open source graphics stack, which is making extremely fast-paced progress.

2. Canonical will never officially update the LTS release to the latest Xorg server / xf86-video-intel / Mesa. Never. Won't happen. Maybe if you have millions of dollars you're willing to pay their development team specifically to do it, then sure -- but otherwise, this is not part of their plan. For that matter, they don't do this for the non-LTS releases, either.

3. You may be able to find a PPA out there with packages that support Lucid. But the two major problems with PPAs are that (a) they frequently get out of date or the maintainer stops updating them, and (b) many of them only provide packages for the latest stable release of Ubuntu. For example, in the xorg-edgers PPA for Lucid (10.04), xserver-xorg-intel was last updated in February 2011, and all the other packages were last updated way back in 2010.

4. You can always compile packages from source. With enough determination, you can run the latest mesa stack and kernel on RHEL 5 (Released in 2007). But the older your distro, compiler, system packages, etc., the more stuff you have to compile from source to get your stack up-to-date. After a certain point, your distro has more differences than similarities to the default packages provided by your distro; it starts looking like Linux from Scratch.

For Lucid, you could probably compile the X server, then xf86-video-intel, libdrm, and mesa from git. But you'd also have to build the latest kernel (2.6.39 or 3.0-rc) to take advantage of some of the latest changes in mesa and the DDX; Lucid's 2.6.32 kernel is pretty old already. And I wouldn't be surprised if you'd have to update some random dependencies, like libtcmalloc (or is it libhalloc now?), llvm, and pixman, not to mention xorg-macros. Basically you're looking at about 10 to 12 package compiles, with the order being important because of dependencies.

If you've never compiled the graphics stack from source like this, it can take a long time and be very frustrating. If you aren't running a server or enterprise desktop environment, I don't think you can come up with a defensible argument for staying on an LTS release (unless you simply don't care about features and performance at all). If you can live without the latest and greatest performance and features, then go ahead and stay with LTS. But if you want the latest, you either have to learn how to compile the graphics stack, or just update to a current release.

You sound like you want the rock-solid stability of an LTS at the same time as the latest and greatest performance features. I have to tell you that this is impossible. The older and more heavily-tested software is, the more reliable it tends to be; but the more out-of-date it is in terms of features and performance relative to the latest code. For ordinary desktop users, my opinion is that the latest stable release (not just LTS) of Ubuntu or Fedora is probably your best compromise between recentness and stability: it's not as heavily tested as an LTS, but neither is it as out-of-date as LTS. And it's not bleeding-edge git code either, so you can rest assured that, at least a few people have kicked the tires on the code to make sure it's not obviously broken.

The good news about the latest stable release such as 11.04 is that you can really easily compile the latest xf86-video-intel, without having to update your kernel or X server, and take advantage of feature adds like this. Because the rest of your stack is pretty much up-to-date. And even if it's not, the xorg-edgers repository is keeping the packages updated for 11.04 because that release is current.

Your other alternative is to try a rolling-release distro such as ArchLinux, which just updates packages to the latest version pretty much in the order that they are released. Over there, there's not really a sense of a "distribution release" like you think of it with Ubuntu: it's perfectly natural on Arch to receive an ordinary system update that takes you from Firefox 3.6 to Firefox 4.0, for example; or from Linux kernel 2.6.38 to 2.6.39. Such things don't happen on full-platform distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc.

I don't mean to discourage you from trying to do this manually, but pre-built binaries are not, and never will be, available for Lucid, either officially or unofficially, because xorg-edgers stopped supporting Lucid long ago, and Canonical won't do it because of their release cycle principles.

Rather than discourage you, I'd rather encourage you: use the bleeding edge! Grow a pair (as we say in gaming circles), man up, and try the latest bleeding-edge code. Grab Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha! Grab Fedora 16 alpha! Just do it. If you're into the latest and greatest, then consume it voraciously, and report bugs when it breaks so we can make the desktop experience better for everyone.

[slander]

In your excellent post, you have answered my current and future questions on this topic, haha! Thank you very much. Thanks to you too, bwat47.