Intel On Haswell Under Linux: "We've Screwed Up"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel On Haswell Under Linux: "We've Screwed Up"

After the change yesterday to now hide early Intel hardware support by default to fend off early driver issues for new graphics hardware -- such as mode-setting just outright failing to work -- Intel has commented a bit more on the driver support for the forthcoming "Haswell" hardware...

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

[mark45]

Ian Romanick [PATCH 1/2] intel: Enable S3TC extensions always
Ian Romanick [PATCH 2/2] i965: Enable floating-point textures always

From here:

Patch 1/2 is probably only a candidate for 9.0 branch. It has a weak
dependency on some other work that's only on 9.0 (see 42723d8).

Patch 2/2 could be a candidate for both 8.0 and 9.0. I suspect that
most people build our driver with floating-point textures enabled
anyway, so it's no real change.

[89c51]

Ian Romanick [PATCH 1/2] intel: Enable S3TC extensions always
Ian Romanick [PATCH 2/2] i965: Enable floating-point textures always

From here:

WOW does this mean that we will have it in all drivers in Mesa.

[d2kx]

WOW does this mean that we will have it in all drivers in Mesa.

No, it doesn't mean anything.

@OT: No worries, Haswell is scheduled for April and Ubuntu 13.04 will use Linux 3.8.

[89c51]

No, it doesn't mean anything.

@OT: No worries, Haswell is scheduled for April and Ubuntu 13.04 will use Linux 3.8.

The next question is why. I mean if intel managed to get over the legal mess why the others can't do the same.

[krypton22]

Poor OpengGL support for Haswell

Intel also doesn't seem to care much about OpenGL for Haswell. They only have support for OpenGL 4.0 in Haswell, which by its launch will be 3 years old. In the mean time, Nvidia will launch OpenGL 4.3 support in their drivers by the end of the year.

Until Intel gets it together with the support for latest OpenGL versions, I can't take them seriously as a graphics company.

[Kano]

Nvidia has got OpenGL 4.3.0 support with driver release 310.14 already. But i hope that Intel works a bit faster that Rage could be used with the Linux driver as well (via wine). With nvidia you don't need to boot win. Sadly Intel win drivers are usually much faster for more demanding games. It is really a pity that Optimus support does not work natively - just because of a few GPL-only exports. Basically Intel gfx is ok for office use but definitely not for gaming (yet). The current hack (bumblebee) is a bit complicated to use.

[smitty3268]

Ian Romanick [PATCH 1/2] intel: Enable S3TC extensions always
Ian Romanick [PATCH 2/2] i965: Enable floating-point textures always

From here:

You still need S3TC lib for some functionality, they've just enabled the same stuff by default that happens now when you set the environment variable since most of the extension is present in mesa.

Very interesting about the fp textures, though.

I wonder if intel licensed this for their hardware, or if their lawyers just said it was ok, or what?

[Sidicas]

Intel, NO, you didn't screw up.

Your hardware isn't even out yet. When your hardware is out, people will just use the 3.8 kernel or whatever kernel they need to use your hardware well. It's really no big deal to pick up a newer kernel version, even if they're running older distributions or a distribution that didn't ship with a newer kernel version. That is why Debian and Ubuntu have backports, for exactly this reason.

If it's 8 months after the hardware is out and your driver isn't stable and doesn't support many features of your hardware.. *THEN* I'd say you screwed up, but that's not going to happen with Haswell. So stop being so hard on yourselves

[Ericg]

Intel, NO, you didn't screw up.

Your hardware isn't even out yet. When your hardware is out, people will just use the 3.8 kernel or whatever kernel they need to use your hardware well. It's really no big deal to pick up a newer kernel version, even if they're running older distributions or a distribution that didn't ship with a newer kernel version. That is why Debian and Ubuntu have backports, for exactly this reason.

If it's 8 months after the hardware is out and your driver isn't stable and doesn't support many features of your hardware.. *THEN* I'd say you screwed up, but that's not going to happen with Haswell. So stop being so hard on yourselves

+1, Kayden please pass these sentiments along to the open source team. If you guys at Intel had decided to do a launch-day code drop for Haswell and a few months, and hundreds of bug reports, later decided "Oops! We screwed up!" THAT would be a big deal and people would be mad. But Haswell isn't even out yet, NO ONE's machine depends on Haswell outside of Intel which means backwards compatibility at any level is non existant. I say break the stuff as many times as you want. Thats a corner stone of programming right there. You wrote a solution to a problem, in this case hardware enablement, realized you didn't do it right and instead of just going "oh well", you went back and fixed it. I say kudos, but here's to hoping that v2 of the code is the right one