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Intel significantly speeds up graphics under Linux (X.org)
- mrothe 15y agoI like the size of this commit! Makes bisecting all so easy!
- eru 15y agoBe careful with sarcasm around here.
- tspiteri 15y agoThe arguments against large commit size do not hold in this case. If you look at it, the patch consists of a few changes to Makefile.am, configure.ac, man/intel.man, src/Makefile.am, and src/intel_module.c, which contain no significant logic, and completely new files in the directories src/sna/ and test/. It's one new feature that is practically self-contained, so I don't see any sense in splitting it up into smaller commits.
- mrothe 15y agoSounds reasonable.
- andrewcooke 15y agoif it's new code, you can't bisect. think about it - you need all the new code to compile. if you only had half, it wouldn't compile. bisecting only makes sense when it's modifications to existing code that can be applied independently.
- ComputerGuru 15y agoThe link's now broken?
- snikolic 15y agoLink broken? update: working now?
- mrspandex 15y agoIs this link working for other people? I just get a "No repositories found"
- eru 15y agoWorks for me. But the patch is huge.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- paines 15y agoSo, as a Debian User, I can have use of this in 5 years.
- danieldk 15y agoOr run Debian Sid, as you ought to on the desktop ;).
- koenigdavidmj 15y agoStill more stable than half the other distributions out there
- learninglemur 15y ago[citation needed] generally people who say this haven't actually tried sid or "other distributions"
- ori_b 15y agoI know that the plural of anecdotes is not data, but I currently run Sid, and I have been for several years. It hasn't been problem free, but I don't recall a system-killing update. The most common problem is some missing or broken dependencies for a package forcing me to hold off installing a package or updating my system for a few days. In the mean time, back when I used to live with someone who used Ubuntu as his main system, and when I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop, I had to fix system-crippling bugs at least 3 times. So, anecdotally, I've had less system-killing problems with Sid than Ubuntu's stable releases.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoWhen it comes to system-killing bugs, it also matters whether you update daily or less often; system-killing bugs often get reported right after a mirror pulse and fixed one or two mirror pulses later (less than a day).
- 15y ago
- robgough 15y agoI probably didn't follow correctly, but doesn't this only affect Sandy Bridge processors?
- robin_reala 15y agoNope: we can take advantage of additional efficiencies, such as relative relocations, that have been incorporated into recent hardware advances. However, even older hardware performs better from avoiding the implicit context switches and from the batching efficiency of the 3D pipeline...
- robgough 15y agodidn't see that, thanks! excellent news then :)
- there 15y agoand from the results of the benchmarks listed, the best speed improvements aren't even on sandybridge (gen6).
- wladimir 15y agoDoes anyone know of a list what is Gen2/Gen3/Gen4 in terms of chips? Does this include the i950, for example?
- chaosfox 15y agoThe title is a bit misleading, it sounds like its a general improvement, when actually its a patch for the intel driver, so it only affects those that use intel cards and this driver, or did I missed something ?
- valyala 15y agoYou are correct. It looks like the patch affects only Intel graphics.
- tropin 15y agoIt'd be more useful if it had a list of hardware expected to improve with this patch.
- smbwrs 15y agoMy current laptop is a Dell C510 running Arch Linux, rocking a massive 384MB of RAM and LXDE. It's relatively (surprisingly) snappy as is, but any improvement is going to make a huge difference. Great work.
- smbwrs 15y agoScratch that, apparently I've got an ATI Radeon Mobility in this thing. Regardless, still an excellent update.
- etherealG 15y agoI'm struggling to understand what this means from the description, anyone mind decoding for me?
- vibragiel 15y agoFWIU, this new architecture makes most of 2D acceleration go through the 3D pipeline, saving a lot of overhead from switching between the two current "rings" (BLT for 2D and RENDER for 3D).
- marshray 15y agoIt's nice to see Intel cares about their X support now. I suspect some of this is a side effect of the popularity of GPGPU computing. If they don't want their lunch eaten by NVidia and ATI/AMD on certain computational benchmarks, they're going to have to provide a professional implementation of OpenCL on Linux. I suspect (am hoping) that the OpenGL acceleration and plain X11 improvements come as part of the package. People don't use Windows-only hardware in their supercomputers. NVidia was the first to realize this and this is one reason they have much of the GPGPU mindshare.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoI am skeptical of this, for two reasons. First, the GPGPU thing really hasn't affected Intel, who still sells more units than either AMD or nVidia, and will probably continue to have a stranglehold on their current markets. GPGPU really doesn't matter to most people. Second, the guy that wrote this code, Chris Wilson, is one of the big guys behind Cairo and had an experiment, cairo-drm, where he plugged Cairo directly to an Intel graphics chipset by talking directly to the kernel and bypassing the Intel X drivers. His results were probably the foundation of this new work, as far as I can guess.
- marshray 15y agoIntel has been trying to get into the GPGPU business for years. The problem for them, of course, is you have to have a credible GPU before you can GP with it. Here's where they tried to glue together a bunch of existing cores (yes P54C Pentiums) and call it a GPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%2... Like early experiments in aviation, it didn't fly. I didn't know about Wilson. I'd somehow gotten the impression that this work had been supported by Intel. Oh well. If they didn't, they shoulda. :-)
- bgruber 15y agocould someone point to a source identifying the different generations of chipset referred to in the test? (gen3, gen4, etc.)
- there 15y agohttp://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c;h=0defd42705943e1776b3e9447a770048142d1a73;hb=HEAD#l85 http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...
- 1337p337 15y agoThis is great. Now if only the newer Intel drivers didn't make X segfault! This seems to be a common problem. I had to downgrade to 2.14.0; some bug introduced in 2.14.903 and still present in 2.15.0 break it thoroughly. Fast is nice, but stable is better.
- ch0wn 15y ago> Fast is nice, but stable is better. I agree. The graphics system is basically the only part where I'm envious of windows users. As far as I know, since vista the graphics driver can crash without tearing down the rest of the graphical system, i. e. no data loss.
- zokier 15y agoWell, on the other hand, nVidias drivers were responsible for 30% of Vista crashes..
- mahrain 15y agoModern distributions are unusable for me because of Intel 855GM graphics driver bugs. The latest one I can use is Ubuntu 10.10 with special patches by glasen-hardt.de, even Fedora 15 and openSUSE 11.4 give me trouble with flashing windows, missing content etc.
- mixmastamyk 15y agoYeah, I have an old lightweight Sony with 852/855 and it ran better with Gentoo five years ago than with Maverick today. To get it to work Ubuntu turns off the acceleration so it feels so damn slow. Crossing my fingers.
- krakensden 15y agoThe worst part is the intel people have been talking about just dropping support for older chips altogether.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y agoFor non-X people (IOW, everybody except me and Josh): This commit speeds up general desktop rendering, in both general and pathological cases, for nearly all Intel graphics chipsets, causing everything to feel snappier and more responsive. It's a universally Good Thing.
- nagnatron 15y agoAny way to get this in Ubuntu soon?
- nagnatron 15y agoFor anyone interested add these PPAs: https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/intel-sna https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/intel-sna This is not considered stable but works OK for me. Read the pages first.