Packard on the state of Linux graphics [LWN.net]

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 25, 2009 18:47 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, I hope that DRI1 et al don't get ripped out of X until the major
drivers have got DRI2 and some GEM alternative in place.

(Actually, I'm sure that'll happen, even though Keith made it sound like
DRI1 was dying *today*: I think what he meant was that it's getting torn
out of the Intel driver, not out of X itself.

I'm not sure if there are any drivers left for which XAA is still
preferred over EXA, though: is XAA in the X server core going to stay
around for long?)

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 25, 2009 19:32 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Hrmm.. Define 'major'.

The open source Nvidia drivers going forward are Nouveau and those are designed from the ground up to be all Gallium-enabled, so that required DRI2.

The open source ATI drivers I am not sure about the status off exactly, but they certainly been working on GEM compatibility.. I think they got a bit sidetracked with the TTM-to-GEM transition, but they've been working with the DRI2 development early on.

Then, of course, Intel is leading the pack with their improvements.

I a took a look at what was going on on OpenChrome mailing lists and I found this that they were working on a pretty-much new Mesa driver to work with DRI2 and the unified memory management scheme.

So it looks like all of them are more or less well on their way to transitioning to the new model.

So that probably cover 98-99% of users with video cards capable of some sort of real opengl performance that have support of open source drivers.

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 25, 2009 20:37 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You pretty much covered the majors, I'd say. (I know one person with an S3
but this is on a nine-year-old machine, which even I would say is not
really worth targetting in new code!)

(Mind you, I've just bought a machine with an Aspeed AST2050 card, which
has no non-free support at all and is minor enough that I'd never heard of
Aspeed at all beforehand --- but it's going to be headless and won't run
an X server, so I don't care.)

The worry I had was that GEM was supposed to be designed around the needs
of Intel's cards, so I wasn't sure how well it would fit any others: but
if they're tracking it, too, then, well, yay, the sun is shining, the
birds are singing and we'll have 3D flying birds as our desktop switchers
by Christmas. ;)

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 26, 2009 1:52 UTC (Sun) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]

xf86-video-ast doesn't work on that one yet? The ChangeLog claims it does.

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 26, 2009 14:30 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I'd never even heard of xf86-video-ast: google didn't find it, and I
overlooked it in the enormous cgit.freedesktop.org output (also, 'ast'
means 'Tanenbaum' to me: it's a pretty useless abbreviation for 'aspeed').

I'll give it a try (but the machine hasn't arrived yet, and there is no
hope of a free driver for a video card attached to a machine that hasn't
yet been assembled: xf86-video-imaginary? ;) )

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 26, 2009 14:33 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Definitely counts as 'not a major': changes implemented by gigantic code
drops from some other repository, no EXA support...

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 26, 2009 17:04 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

I believe that S3 is basically what you ave now in recent crappy sis boards. Sadly I inherited one such system. Well, it's good enough to show a console or X with lots of xterms.

BTW: what about graphics chipset(s?) included in popular ARM/MIPS SoC?

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 26, 2009 19:40 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The only one that I am really aware of that has real OpenGL acceleration for Linux would be the ones included in such devices like the Dell Mini-12* and OMAP3 plaform.

*The Mini-12 uses a variant of the 'full embedded' Atom processor + Atom-oriented chipset that Intel and friends intended for the MID/handheld market. Typically Atom-based netbooks/laptops (like the mini-9) use older Intel laptop-oriented chipsets like the 915g or 945g and the chipset uses more energy then the actual cpu.

These use the PowerVR SGX core.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR

Now for the Dell Mini-12 and other Atom-based systems Intel provides the proprietary Poulsbo OpenGL driver (along with OSS DRM and 2D driver).

I don't know about the OMAP3 stuff...

Now if you looked at Tungsten graphic's documentation for Gallium they mentioned PowerVR with pretty much every other sentance. I don't know the status of any of that stuff, though. Especially since Tungstan graphics has been bought out by Vmware.

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted May 14, 2009 10:25 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

> Mind you, I've just bought a machine with an Aspeed AST2050 card,

This is a glorified frame buffer (typically) inside the service processor
that you can access remotely to install OSes that don't feel well over a
serial console (I'm looking towards Redmond here).

A lot of serious servers come with something equivalent. As its main use
is installation and recovery graphics acceleration does not make sense
IMO.

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted May 14, 2009 20:41 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah! I was wondering if this was in some way related to the
apparently-undocumented 'iKVM' feature (comes with really annoying
ungoogleable name identical save for case to that of major Java package).
Apparently it is.

(I'll see if it's documented in the motherboard manual when the machine
arrives tomorrow, after one motherboard failure and one evaporation in
courier transit. Someone Up There does *not* want me to have this
machine.)

Packard on the state of Linux graphics

Posted Apr 27, 2009 7:53 UTC (Mon) by ppedroni (subscriber, #6592) [Link]

> I'm not sure if there are any drivers left for which XAA is still
> preferred over EXA, though: is XAA in the X server core going to stay
> around for long?)

Ati binary driver, AFAIK (I haven't used that in a long time, but when I
last looked at it, it was still XAA only).