Intel Open Sources Graphics Drivers 345
PeterBrett writes "Intel's Keith Packard announced earlier today that Intel was open sourcing graphics drivers for their new 965 Express Chipset family graphics controllers. From the announcement: 'Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset
family includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. By open sourcing the drivers for this new technology, Intel enables the open source community to experiment, develop, and contribute to the continuing advancement of open source 3D graphics.' The new drivers, available from the Linux Graphics Drivers from Intel website, are licensed under the GPL for Linux kernel drivers, and MIT license for XOrg 2D & 3D rendering subsystems."
bravo, intel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe we'll start seeing Intel graphics clones... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that there's a working Intel 3D driver with source, does this mean that other vendors might start making cheap clones of the Intel graphics chips? Or was the above argument really a red herring.
And if they did, what's to stop them from making chips that use the same API, but work much better?
Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet they're trying to preempt AMD doing the same with an integrated ATI chip.
Well played, Intel. Well played.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Y'know, I understand members of the Linux community choosing to buy this on principle, but come on. The Intel graphics are so incredibly far behind nV and ATI that it's ridiculous...unless you're not planning to play ANY recent games. I could see going with ATI over nVidia if they open sourced theirs (or the reverse) but going Intel just for that would be nuts.
who needs open source drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah! Damn those blobs, giving you all that performance!!
Why would an open source driver be slower than blobs if the manufacturers created it?
The way I see it, by giving ATI/Nv my money I'm saying "hey, it's ok to pollute my system with code I can't look at" (and yes, I am capable of looking at it, but even if I wasn't *someone* is and that's the point). So Intel will be getting my money when I buy a new motherboard.
And it's not just about games - Xgl/compiz, xcompmgr, etc. etc.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe we'll start seeing Intel graphics clones. (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a VERY important development (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:bravo, intel (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, having source code available may help improve quality, but it certainly isn't a foregone conclusion.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Linux Laptops! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
Excellent point. Have they released drivers for their wifi components yet?
Pwn The Market? (Score:4, Insightful)
Closed-source Linux drivers can work well enough for a single kernel version in a controlled environment. You still don't get support from most distros that would want to build their own. Sure, if you cooperate you get in Novell and Red Hat's offerings, but not much further. You also get the onus of sinking the money into it to keep it working. Not to mention you pretty much guarantee being a problem to your users--think things like software suspend that never work right with closed drivers because certain problems can't be debugged or fixed (in which case improved quality *IS* a foregone conclusion).
You either get SLES / RHEL, or you get SLES / RHEL / Debian / Ubuntu / everything else... Not to mention improved operation. Of course, gravitating toward what works is why people are using open source in the first place. Sometimes "what works" is defined in terms of avoiding vendor lock-in and extortionate licensing.
Re:who needs open source drivers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OT: Moderation (Score:1, Insightful)
Thus, overrated.
Re:Linux Laptops! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Now... (Score:2, Insightful)
It does however re-stake a claim on the enthusiast market so coveted by AMD and may force AMD to open source their ATI drivers. That could be problematic for AMD thus serving Intels purpose just fine. To lesser degree this move also puts some heat on nVidia and their n-Force chipset solution by the same token.
One point of it all is that Intel can afford and are in good position to open source their video drivers. They are not a market force in the performance arena but Intel does have very high volume numbers. It is unknown if AMD can likewise afford to open source newly aquired ATI drivers and certainly nVidia has been resistant historically.
This move is literally no skin off Intels nose but could well peel some hide from AMD/ATI most notably and nVidia as a bonus.
Full specifications - not open source (Score:3, Insightful)
So my question is this - does Intel also fully disclose the full specifications and internal workings of their chipset? My guess is no. Most likely, the drivers will be developed by Intel employees with access to internal documents. Those drivers could then be debugged and possibly optimized by the community but the community will still be locked out of development.
Willy
"you're not planning to play ANY recent games" (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I'm ecstatic over FINALLY being able to purchase a system that will run Google Earth, that I won't have to fuck with every time a kernel update happens, or ATI breaks their latest blob and I have to spend hours googling for a fix, or nvidia hasn't once again broken something because they don't think anyone but 10 users still use this graphics card.
There's *nothing* but good to be said about open source graphics card drivers that support halfway decent OpenGL. Even if I don't have the privledge of spending $500 upgrading my rig just to play whatever the flavour of the month PC game is out.
If Intel would do this for add-on cards and not just integrated chipsets (which is what I hear is the deal so far), I'd be as happy as I've been ever since discovering Linux.
Re:Maybe we'll start seeing Intel graphics clones. (Score:2, Insightful)
And their secrets only need to be protected for a few years, the rate at which it becomes obsolescent, which is faster than reverse engineering time; and much shorter than patent protection time.
I'm sure they're perfectly capable of reverse engineering the drivers without having to look at the chip under a microscope.
And that is why Linux has no driver issues.
I've been known to make some custom hardware. If you give me driver code I can make you a chip that will run it; perfectly. If you give me a chip and a binary driver I can make the chip do something with my own code, but I'll never figure out everything it can do without the specs. Never, ever. No matter how bright I am.
KFG
Cmmoditization move (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Full specifications - not open source (Score:4, Insightful)
Their silicon is just crippled - there's honestly no way around that when you're effectively producing a $5 graphics solution (which is approximately the cost difference between Intel chipsets without integrated graphics and Intel chipsets with integrated graphics.) Even if a technology is economical to implement in silicon, at that price point it's not feasible to license technologies from other companies unless absolutely necessary, such as S3 Texture Compression, which was the technology that basically started the branch between closed-source and open-source ATI chipset support.
It does what it's designed to do extremely well (unlike many other "el cheapo" solutions which are designed to do more but just don't do any of it well), it just simply is NOT designed to do very much.
Re:Now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a VERY important development (Score:3, Insightful)
If you play games, well then they are not fine. But gamers are such a minority I dont their attitude should destroy a sensible purchase.
Re:Competition from AMD/ATI? (Score:4, Insightful)
A driver does not have to be in the tree to be stable, running driver, and the driver being in the kernel tree doesn't mean that it is either stable or running.
And I should know, as I have written multiple closed-source Linux device drivers, two of which have open-source versions in the kernel that have at various times either not worked, or worked poorly, and both of which perform signifigantly worse than the closed version.
Go actually read that document. The argument it makes is that a stable kernel/driver API is a bad idea because the kernel/driver API is unstable. It's a circular argument. The real issue is three-fold. One, there isn't enough agreement amongst the diversity of kernel developers to ever come up with a stable API, two, there is no dicipline amongst the people in charge to maintain that stability even if a consensus was reached, and three, there are some who would like to keep the interface unstable merely to keep this argument for open source drivers valid.
Dispite all that, the only real roadblock between ease of binary driver development and what we have today is that there is heavy backporting amongst distribution vendors without incrementing the kernel version number. In other words, vendors lie about their versions in order to maintain the illusion of version stability for their customers... But even that is a minor issue, as it only makes the people who run on the bleeding edge suffer, and nobody runs on the bleeding edge in production.
Re:Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe we'll start seeing Intel graphics clones. (Score:5, Insightful)
Another reason why they are unwilling to release the information might be because it would prove that they have been bullshitting us for a long time.
Chances are that the difference between a £50 card and a £300 card is in the software: by changing just one bit in one byte in the huge, bloated blob of a driver, you could extract £300 performance from a £50 graphics card. It can't be economically viable for them to fabricate different GPUs to use on "cheap" and "expensive" cards. Instead, they have an I/O pin {maybe several pins?} on the GPU which they tie to 0V {so it reads as a 0} on the cheap cards, or leave unconnected {so it looks like a 1} on the expensive cards. The driver software reads the state of the pin and determines whether or not to run the card in "expensive" mode.
{Then, of course, there are the various "cheats" built into games to make them run faster or better with certain graphics cards -- or, to put it more accurately, to make them run slower or worse with other graphics cards. Games companies are certainly not above accepting bakshish.}
The RAW formats used by digital cameras are similarly undocumented for pretty much the same reason: the JPEG files are interpolated up to much higher resolutions than the sensor actually generates. Revealing the format of the RAW file would also reveal the real number of pixels on the image sensor, and likely open up camera manufacturers to prosecution under consumer protection law.
Re:Now... (Score:3, Insightful)