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The Special Intel Broadwell Driver In Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

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  • #11
    Originally posted by chrisb View Post
    I have no idea who you are or what you are responsible for. If you were to ask "Do you really think that Ububtu would release something with insufficient testing across different hardware platforms", then yes, I do. On the last LTS, Unity crashed immediately after logging in with my hardware (ATI open source driver). Ubuntu users have many diverse hardware platforms, even restricting it to Broadwell you are going to have users with hybrid graphics, multiple monitors, triple monitor setups with PLL sharing (which if I recall correctly was broken for ages on Haswell), mixed resolutions and orientations, different desktops Unity Gnome KDE, different applications, 4k TVs and monitors, etc. Basically every issue that appeared in the upstream Xorg bug tracker for Haswell, is a likely issue point for Broadwell (why? Because those cases were missed by Intel's internal testing but picked up by end users, it is likely that the same thing will happen again).
    Right, my tone wasn't ideal.. I work for Canonical on the Hardware Enablement team, and there are machines on the OEM pipeline with Broadwell that we're working on. Note that for radeon graphics I think we're mostly certifying the machines with fglrx, so if upstream doesn't push fixes to stable@ then we won't get them. And I don't doubt there will be enough issues with BDW to at least keep me busy the coming months..

    With Haswell there were issues like upstream rewriting the modesetting code around the same time (3.6/3.7) HSW was being enabled, and it took a few releases to get the issues fixed (3.8 was still buggy at places).

    The fact that this had to be back ported to avoid a painful SRU is an organisational issue, not a code issue (would you have bothered with a backport if it weren't necessary to go through the SRU process?) I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea, it's obviously a better situation than Debian (where Wheezy is unusable on modern Intel hardware), but it's not ideal.
    No the backport had to be done, and to avoid a possible NACK after release it was pushed before the distro kernel freeze.

    Btw Do you think there might be any problems keeping hybrid graphics drivers in sync? Don't the Nvidia drivers get updated often even on LTS? Any hybrid graphics features/changes there will appear in the LTS but without the desponding upstream kernel changes which could be an issue for such tightly linked components. How well does hybrid graphics word with Broadwell and a modern stack anyway, is it still a mess?
    Yes it's a mess, but getting better with dma_buf and all. The way to get them in sync is to depend on a point-release stack, like for instance the nvidia-prime stuff for 12.04.4 did (IIRC), or at least it was only supported on that stack. Also, it doesn't matter which generation intel you have on a hybrid machine, they should work of fail just the same.

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