Free Intel i965 graphics drivers released

Posted Aug 10, 2006 7:28 UTC (Thu) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

We've bought a huge pile of sDVO cards to work on the modesetting branch. One thing we discovered is that there are two flavors of sDVO cards, the ADD2-N and ADD2-R cards. The suffix indicates whether the card is set up in 'N'ormal or 'R'everse orientation; Normal cards use the first channels on the PCI-E connector while Reverse cards use the last channels.

All of the motherboards we have support only Normal cards, I guess the theory for Reverse cards is that you could plug in a PCI-E x4 card into the same PCI-E bus as one of the Reverse cards and have both things working at the same time.

And, all of the ADD2-N cards we've got work just fine with everything from 915 through 965.

I can see where the AGP-based ADD (not ADD2) cards would cause problems; they don't use a standard interface so the driver has to have support for each specific card. We're facing that with the modesetting branch and we're collecting information on as many of those as we can.

In summary - ADD2-N cards 'just work' everywhere we've tried them. ADD cards require card-specific driver changes.