Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset [LWN.net]

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 6:28 UTC (Fri) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)
In reply to: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset by khim
Parent article: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

"Intel is still far from being good free software citizen: wireless, etc."

Their latest cards allow all of the FCC required crap to be in the firmware, allowing 100% Free drivers with no binary kernel blob or daemon. I don't believe their older cards can do this, but that's a legal issue, not Intel's fault. They went way out of their way to extend hardware functionality just for Free Software users.

You can maybe argue that not giving away firmware source still makes them evil, but I've always found that silly. Those argument disappear if the firmware were hard-coded in the ASIC - the only purpose of firmware is to allow the hardware vendor to fix bugs in the firmware without forcing you to buy upgraded components. It's not something that users can really hack with any meaningful value, unless the firmware is just needlessly crippled - and the wireless firmware is crippled for legal reasons, which any company is definitely going to consider a strong need here in the real world.

"support only limited functionality"

In the case of limitations on functionality in Intel's latest batch of drivers, it's only because the developers just haven't gotten to it yet. The missing features in the X.org drivers are documented and scheduled to be finished this year.

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Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 6:55 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Ya.. moving the regulartory crap to the firmware was a very good move for Intel.

I wouldn't buy their devices if it required a propriatory blob, weither or not it existed as a kernel driver or daemon.

Firmware files, while I'd like to avoid, I can live with without complaint.

What we should be aiming for in vendors, though, is still specifications and/or avoid restrictive NDAs.

I can respect NDAs if the intention and purpose and effect is designed to protect things like manufacturing proccess, or future product releases.. Anything that is not nessicary to write drivers for the hardware.

Say if some Linux or X.org hacker wanted to add XVMC support to the Intel drivers...

Would Keith be allowed to help him with this? Would he be allowed to talk about it? Is that other developer going to be stuck pulling the old ATI and Nvidia game with reverse engineering the hardware and mucking around capturing traffic between the hardware and the Windows drivers?

Is that proper, so that your still not allowed to know how to operate the hardware, that developers can't talk about it, can't spread information or use their skills to help get support for other hardware?

So that's still distastefull for me. I care more then just about being able to redistribute source code, being able to communicate and share knowledge is very important, even potentially more important.

Although I'll take what I can get in terms of hardware support.

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 13, 2007 4:29 UTC (Sun) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

> Say if some Linux or X.org hacker wanted to add XVMC support to the Intel drivers...

Of course I'd love for that to happen, our list of things we'd like to see the drivers do is fairly extensive. But, unless we can provide reasonable documentation, it's going to be really hard to break into a big new area of functionality like this. The current header files document what the driver uses, but not a lot beyond that.

What we are doing is trying to get some minimal XvMC support done this year so that the hardware functionality is reasonably well described in both code and comments. At that point, I'm hoping others will be able to help expand support for additional encodings, and other activities.

Any help we can get will be appreciated. Questions about specific chip operations that can be answered by consulting the specs are something I'd like to spend more time answering.

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 11, 2007 18:09 UTC (Fri) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

Yeah, free software to run on the actual wireless card itself would be way cool, but having at least fully free (and, hopefully soon, mainline) kernel drivers is a big step in the right direction.

So however silly the centrino branding may otherwise be, for new laptops it looks like it will provide some reasonable assurance that the things I care about will Just Work on any sufficiently recent free linux distribution.

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 13, 2007 4:41 UTC (Sun) by keithp (subscriber, #5140) [Link]

> "support only limited functionality"

The big ticket items on the list for graphics are OpenGL 2.1 and hardware accelerated video playback. Other than that, the new drivers expose quite a bit more of the hardware than the 1.3 version, with native mode programming for everything we could get our hands on.

OpenGL 2.1 support is largely a matter of working with the Mesa project to add needed functionality to the library and DRI subsystem in the kernel. We're busy on both fronts there; Zou Nanhai is busy taking the new GLSL compiler and generating Gen4 instructions, and Eric Anholt is working on the TTM memory system to finally provide for FBOs and other necessary features.

For media playback, Xiang Haihao is working on XvMC support. Adding iDCT support and H.264 decode support is also on the list, but those are limited by the lack of any API capable of exposing them to applications. We're working with some of the media playback developers to figure out what might work here.

There's lots of work to do just to get things functional; beyond that, we've got plenty of low-hanging optimizations that should keep everyone busy.

Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset

Posted May 13, 2007 11:36 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Wonderfull.

You guys working on this stuff definately deserve praise. It's going to be great when nobody can accuse 'Open Source Graphics Drivers' of being 'Second Class Graphics Drivers'

Every time I look at projects like OpenCroquet, Beryl, OpenRT, and other such things.. and relatively lack of stability of drivers (closed and open source) it just makes me think about how much all this ultra-proprietory attitude is realy holding back progress.

The technology X is now able to bring to the table is amazing. You have things like DMX for X sessions spreading across multiple computers. Chromium for distributed OpenGL acceleration.

Then support for multiple pointers in MPX. Then you have Multi-seat support in X, for true multi-user PC environments. The ability to migrate applications across displays with xmove.

Seriously, using Blender over a encrypted ssh with hardware acceleration thanks to AIGLX makes me giggle.

People talk about oh web2.0, but I don't think that the web's REST architecture is realy suitable for what people are trying to do with hosted applications and such.. but FreeNX allows me to use my desktop quite well over the internet. X on a modern 'broadband' internet, I think, has real potential.

And all sorts of stuff like that.. it's all very exiting and compelling. But it's all limited by the lack of very good drivers for most people.

Right now Intel 945g chipset is the only graphics that have stable 3D and 2D acceleration support out of box for Linux.

If Intel is able to get things stable and help/let you guys keep/get things open for the high-end graphics that people say are coming in a couple years then I think that we can start expecting very wonderfull things with X, Linux, OpenGL, and Intel.