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Linux users: watch out for last-gen Intel Atom
- fsniper 14y agoIntel is becoming more evil everyday. They did not learn from Poulsbo fiasco or they really do not care about Linux users. By the way, isn't atom all about Linux
- Aissen 14y agoIt's not that simple. In the article I say that things will change in the not-so-distant future for ValleyView Atoms. And for "high-end" CPUs/SoCs like IvyBridge or SandyBridge, you're good to go.
- fsniper 14y agoThe thing is not about using some other producer's chipset. It's all about making wrong choices about driver and software side.
- ajross 14y agoTo date, all Atom SoCs but Pine Trail (which has an Intel GPU) have used the PVR SGX. Cedar Trail is just another member of this family. It's a proprietary IP core with a GPL kernel driver but no free userspace. Intel provides the userspace libraries gratis for a handful of platforms (MeeGo, in this case) but sadly not all of them (my peeve is the lack of any x86_64 support). So no: Cedar Trail is a poor platform to use for linux if you want accelerated graphics (but there are some cheap boards I'm looking at that seem really attractive for hobby projects). But it's not Intel becoming "more evil", they're just shipping the same stuff. There will be a Valley View chip out later this year which goes back to Intel Graphics. Is that evidence of Intel becoming "less evil"?
- fsniper 14y agoIn my opinion reviving meego just to be able to ship unusable and half-baked drivers is evil. I've written this at least 3 times on HN now, I'm not against using PVR chips, I'm against Intel not shipping related consumer ready drivers.
- ajross 14y agoWhy are the drivers unusable and half-baked? Have you tried them? You're saying that if they don't build on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever you use that they're ... evil? That's a ridiculous stretch, sorry. Intel's community support on the SGX is no better or worse than Apple's or Google's or Samsung's. They support the OSes they want, which in this case means Windows and Linux i686 ("MeeGo" libraries are compatible with basically any modern distro -- try them). They're not free drivers, because no drivers for this part are free.
- wmf 14y agoIt's not evil, it's just lazy. Atom is a low-cost chip and they can't spend zillions developing it. They needed a small GPU and it was much cheaper to license PowerVR than to design a new GPU. (I guess Intel's GPU is not that area-efficient or something.)
- archangel_one 14y agoI agree that it's most likely incompetence rather than malice, although it casts Intel in kind of a poor light. They're a chip designer who have been trying to make inroads on graphics recently, and who have produced mediocre but usable graphics chips in the past, and they can't figure out how to stuff something in there themselves?
- fsniper 14y agoI'm not against them to license a simple, low power consumption chip. But The evil is creating proprietary and unusable software drivers. If it was only laziness the could just license enough driver code to be open sourced. The Linux ecosystem is capable enough to hand over development from there.
- wmf 14y agoNo, the Linux ecosystem is not capable. Look at the open source Radeon and Noveau drivers; they're way behind their proprietary counterparts. Also, Imagination refuses to publish PowerVR documentation and it's not clear that they'd even allow open source developers to access the docs under NDA.
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- zvrba 14y agoAs far as I've understood this article, the relevant source is available. So what's the problem? Why should Intel spend time and resources to integrate it with the mainstream, esp. if this is a short-lived processor family?
- Aissen 14y agoDon't get me wrong. Intel is free to do whatever it sees fit. And Linux users and enthousiasts are free to buy or not to buy Intel-based hardware. As long as they are well-informed, which is the purpose of this post.
- ajross 14y agoThe kernel module is GPL, but all (heh, "all" -- it's a very big driver) it does is do things like memory allocation and mapping, power management, mode setting and command transfer. All the meaningful parts of the 3D engine (shader compiler, GPU code generator, etc...) are in userspace (in prebuilt binaries for MeeGo). The kernel doesn't do anything but take the output from those components and hand it to the hardware to execute.
- rwmj 14y agoHow hard would it be to disassemble the userspace code and work out how the card works? (Serious question)
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- buster 14y agoI can only say the same. Bought a mighty expensive Sony netbook only to figure out that this integrated PowerVR graphics chip is a total disaster. In Windows and much more in Linux, where it is 1. a pain to even bring to work and 2. so slow that it's barely usable. I must say i am really disappointed by Intel, which (in my oppinion) had and have great Linux support in their products. But not in this one. Stay away from Atoms with non-Intel Graphics.
- gcb 14y agoyou mean, intel, the manufacturer of wifi drivers that only works with binary blobs? or the manufacturer of GPUs that work wonders with linux because they have no feature at all? i wouldn't count them so happily as linux supporters.
- hollerith 14y ago>GPUs that work wonders with linux because they have no feature at all? That's a little unfair. They might suck at 3-d immersive games, but some of us do not want to play 3-d immersive games, and the GPU integrated into my Core i5 does everything I want it to except perhaps smoothly play 1080p video. (720p playback OTOH works flawlessly.)
- mattst88 14y agoYour Core i5 should have graphics with VA-API (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Acceleration_API) support, which shouldn't have any trouble playing 1080p video.
- hollerith 14y agoI tested your assertion (on a clip with 48 frames/sec) and I could not get the video to skip. So, strike the part of my previous comment about 1080p video. (Maybe Adobe's notorious Flash Player for OS X was the cause of the skipping I observed in the past. If you give VLC a .flv file, does VLC use Adobe's player to play it?)
- whacker 14y agoFedora 17 added support to provide gnome3 support even with software rendering. See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_rendering http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_...
- Symmetry 14y agoNice that it exists, but I wouldn't want to try that with only an Atom CPU. When you have a low-power CPU like that is exactly when you need graphics acceleration.
- raverbashing 14y agoGnome 3 is not the answer, and if Gnome 3 is the question the answer is No Just don't bother with it.
- freehunter 14y agoIf it works, then it must be at least one of the answers. Sometimes it's good to put aside your Luddite feelings.
- raverbashing 14y agoYou're assuming I didn't try it And sorry, I can't find much reasons to praise it
- baq 14y agoyou just need to ask one question: who is the most important customer of imagination technologies? hint: it's not intel and it shows.
- dexen 14y agoThere used to be a pretty decent Linux driver for PowerVR Kyro and Kyro 2 GPUs back in the day†. I wonder if it could be updated to the current breed of chips. † I recall playing Quake 3 Arena on it on Linux, with framerate matching or exceeding Windows'.
- rfugger 14y agoI've learned the hard way to stay a year or two behind the curve on hardware to avoid Linux compatibility issues.
- sciurus 14y agoThat wouldn't have helped in this case. The Poulsbo chipset launched in 2008, and (unaccelerated) GMA500 support was only merged into Linux in the 3.3 kernel in May 2012.
- dbbolton 14y agoBefore this, I had never thought of Gist as a legitimate blogging platform.
- willvarfar 14y agoWhich is a shame, because at a hardware level I've always liked Imagination's tech. Wish Imagination would solve this problem by open-sourcing some proper drivers. Because most of the performance woes will be bad driver integration, and world will be wowed by a decent driver making the SGX punch, as it does, above its weight.
- mappu 14y ago"It hit the market during the last few weeks." is inaccurate, these chips have been around for a while (although my country just got more stock recently) and Phoronix covered this as it happened. These chips don't even have gpu drivers for Windows 7 x64. You have to run the 32-bit version, which is strange since the boards all support >4GB ram. Another interesting thing to note is that the D2700 is already EOL'd [1] - i don't know when this happened exactly, but it can't have had more than 6 months on the market - and Intel have extended embedded production on the previous generation 5xx chips(?). 1. http://ark.intel.com/products/59683/ http://ark.intel.com/products/59683/
- pjmlp 14y agoThis just goes to show how companies only support Linux with half heart and as long as it somehow fulfills their agenda. Intel which is supposed to be a good citizen does not think twice when it comes to betray Linux support, and the same can be said for any other company.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoWhich is who's fault? If everybody has trouble with the time, effort, expense of supporting linux, perhaps its linux that is the problem. I'm not a linux user, ever since my introduction to it several years ago. Bought up-to-date computers for my team. Linux fan suggested we develop on linux. Tried it - disaster. Didn't support video chip, raid controller, even all the memory. Open office tools crashed. First doc I imported displayed in upper-left corner of the screen, every character in the file in one big spiderey blob. We expunged linux, booted Windows(!), it asked for drivers ("Have disk?" Yes!) and everything up and running in minutes. And we were developing new Infiniband code FOR LINUX! For testing we ran a virtual machine booting linux - that worked of course. Moral: until Linux has a "Have disk" button, I don't see it deploying successfully on production machines. In a hobbyists garage, sure. But not mainstream. For all the reasons listed in other posts here.
- Anderkent 14y agoThe problem is that developing drivers for Linux AND Windows will always take more time/resource than developing drivers for Windows alone. This is hardly Linux's fault. And, well, if you buy hardware from shoddy vendors, don't expect it to work with every OS. For me personally Linux has always worked decently out-of-the-box, and outperformed Windows with a bit of tinkering. (I admit I never bothered to do tinkering in Windows though. I don't know if you can, and how much can be done.)
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoAll true. Unfortunately the blame game is moot- its still true that linux isn't ready for prime time.
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