Here's Another Intel Poulsbo Linux Driver...

Intel's Poulsbo Linux support is a bloody mess. It has been for nearly two years now and the situation has really not improved at all. While Intel IGPs are generally well supported under Linux with an open-source driver stack (besides being very slow), the Poulsbo hardware on Linux is notorious and does not have a fully open-source driver because the GMA 500 chipset is designed around the PowerVR SGX 535 graphics core from Imagination Technologies rather than being brewed in-house. The situation is really bad.

Even with MeeGo, Intel's mobile Linux OS formed out of marrying Moblin and Nokia's Maemo, the Poulsbo support still sucks with Intel not even being allowed to ship their own driver and they even admitting there are too many Poulsbo drivers with none of them being that good. The situation with Intel's newer Moorestown GMA 600 graphics is the same. While there's already enough incomplete Poulsbo Linux drivers out there, another one is available today.

Before getting too excited though, this Poulsbo driver is intended to just be a stub and really provides nothing besides enabling the ACPI backlight control sysfs entry files. That's it. This 80-line Linux kernel driver comes out of Novell by Chun-Yi Lee and is open-source, albeit it's incredibly simple and doesn't do much.

Those interested in this Poulsbo stub driver for Linux can find it currently on the dri-devel mailing list. It could end up being pushed into the mainline Linux 2.6.37 kernel albeit this isn't too helpful for those wanting 2D/3D/video support for the Intel GMA 500/600 in the Linux kernel.