Intel's uneven embrace of Free Software
Intel's uneven embrace of Free Software
Posted May 11, 2007 12:48 UTC (Fri) by brugolsky (guest, #28)In reply to: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset by drag
Parent article: Free software drivers for the Intel 965GM Express Chipset
Much of Intel's open source strategy seems to focus around the strategic value of its chipsets and the Centrino brand. While AMD processors were handily besting them on performance, Intel was busy standardizing its platform components and ensuring good support for them.
Intel opened the specs to AHCI, and that is doing for SATA what ATAPI did for CD-ROMS. [ Remember when nearly every CD-ROM interface had its own driver? ] We now have good AHCI support.
The efforts to open up the WiFi drivers, and to do it in concert with building a better core WiFi stack, is also the right move.
On the graphics front, Intel is playing catchup, and this is a good play for them. Their integrated graphics produces significant power savings over discrete graphics components.
Where they really fall down is in documenting the rest of their chipsets, because they push utter crap like ACPI, EFI, DRM etc., and refuse to cooperate with LinuxBIOS. I spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to work around BIOS deficiencies. The BIOS from major vendors like DELL is worse than useless. If Intel doesn't want workarounds like ACPI DSDT override in the kernel, then they should spend time and money getting vendors to fix the BIOS. Where's the "Intel-Certified" campaign?
AMD, on the other hand, has published great technical specs of the components that they produce: the AMD Opteron and Athlon64 processors, basic chipsets, etc. Unfortunately, their partners including Nvidia and recently acquired ATI have been less forthcoming, so this great advantage has been squandered.
Posted May 11, 2007 12:59 UTC (Fri)
by drag (guest, #31333)
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BTW with the Santa Rosa platform they claim they are going to use EFI instead of a BIOS. It'll be interesting to see how it affects you.
(well most of it, the mac80211 (which seems to be the Linux stack of the future) was originally from DeviceScape, a wireless hardware provider that used Linux in it's designs. Of course it had to be beaten into shape to make it work with kernel.org Linux properly. It's due for inclusion with 2.6.22. The Intel stack has grown into disfavor and on their latest devices intel has rewriten their drivers to use the mac80211)
I like AMD a bit more then Intel.. but Via seems to have given up the ghost on new chipsets, Nvidia are bastards when it comes to Linux support and ATI is worse.
I just realy hope that AMD rubs off on ATI much much more then ATI rubs off on AMD.
Posted May 11, 2007 14:20 UTC (Fri)
by arjan (subscriber, #36785)
[Link] (2 responses)
Intel is actually actively working on helping Dell and others get the BIOS "mess" right: http://www.linuxfirmwarekit.org is done EXACTLY for that reason, and Dell, HP, IBM and many others are now using this.... it doesn't solve existing systems but new ones have a standing chance now.
If you have a specific bios bug you run into and you think it'd be useful to test for... let us know.
Posted May 14, 2007 13:40 UTC (Mon)
by brugolsky (guest, #28)
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As I'm sure that you are aware, if you want to help Linux on Intel boxes, get Intel to participate in LinuxBIOS, and just get us to userland as quickly as possible. After putting the machine in the rack and cold booting, I have almost no use for the BIOS - I want to kexec into my next kernel, and I want the hardware to work properly. If SMI is needed for anything, it should be
fixing up my hardware state when I kexec -- other than that, it should
get out of the way.
I am currently grappling with trying to force-enable HPET on a number of motherboards -- between the HPET doc and the patches posted to LKML, I'll probably get it working - but what a waste of time, and why? Serial consoles on a large number of motherboards have inconsistent settings (some do 9600, some only do 57600, some on ttyS0, some on ttyS1), have broken terminal handling, and hang in various ways. A hint to BIOS vendors: terminal escape sequences and lack of flow control don't mix well; the whole business of exporting the console display is just braindead. I want a boot log, I want it stored somewhere, and I want to be able to dump it into /var/log/ once my machine is up. Why it can't have a real settable verbosity level. Even GRUB can do better than that. We have Intel-SE7320VP2 motherboards with Marvel and Intel E1000 NICs; of course the machine can't PXE boot from the E1000. Every BIOS seems to have a different PXE enable/disable behavior, and it presents so many headaches in a VLAN and security rich environment that we use USB sticks on our DMZ machines instead.
My brand-new Core2 Duo ICH7-based laptop is currently using ata_piix, for lack of a config option to switch to AHCI. :-(
I went to the EFI sessions at OLS a few years ago, and I was appalled. I apparently still can't do something like:
Perhaps the engineers should have a look at the "lxbios" tool.
Where are the config commands that would allow me to do a "setpci" to workaround a misconfigured bridge? Perhaps it is there now, but I wouldn't know, because I walked away in disgust.
EFI introduces yet another driver model. One would think that nobody at Intel is aware of the problems with MILO, SILO, GRUB, OpenBoot etc. EFI is so bloated, many BIOS flash parts now have enough room for a whole mini Linux distro. I guess I should count that as a blessing; someday LinuxBIOS may run on the handful of new Intel chipsets, and then we'll have plenty
of room to install a mini-distro in flash.
Posted May 17, 2007 16:29 UTC (Thu)
by zooko (guest, #2589)
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I wish that there was a central, organized, updated web site with all of this kind of information so that I could go to that web site before buying any new hardware. The FSF has a list [2], but somehow it doesn't seem to be complete, informative, organized, or fresh enough for me to trust. (It doesn't help that I submitted a couple of e-mails to them giving information about some hardware and they never wrote back nor, as far as I noticed, added my information to their list.)
[1] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/free-bios.html
[2] http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw
I absolutely agree with you. Intel's uneven embrace of Free Software
(disclaimer: I work for Intel)BIOS compat issues
Thanks, I took note of your original announcement, and then it passed off my radar. This and PowerTOP look useful, and I certainly appreciate the efforts of you and others at Intel to improve the situation. So take the following as the rantings of someone driven mad by machine room noise. :-P
The problems is not compatibility, it is a broken model.
Is that the "sham open source bios" project that the FSF linuxbios people decry? [1]BIOS compat issues