On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 09:21 +0100, Peter Robinson wrote: > > I suspect what may be happening is the original group is continuing to > > work on the crack-addled drivers that show up in the Ubuntu repos from > > time to time, while a different group works on creating a > > non-crack-addled driver that'll be sent through the proper processes. > > But that's just my guess, as no-one at Intel seems to want to say > > anything. > > Isn't the Poulsbo GPU based on a powerVR core that Intel licensed? > That might explain some of the crack. Yes, it more or less does; that's why they sub-contracted the development, the hardware is substantially different from previous Intel chips, and the existing Linux development team within Intel didn't have much familiarity with it, and was too busy to drop everything and learn about this new hardware. So they contracted development out to a group who are very familiar with the PowerVR hardware, but apparently think a driver which relies on a libdrm branch and three separate chunks of proprietary code (not to mention a badly-written kernel module just to make 2D work) is a sensible design. I've been told, though, that the GMA500 is actually a Frankenstein design, with the PowerVR 3D (and hardware video playback acceleration) core glued on to a standard Intel 2D core, so if that's accurate, it should be reasonably easy to come with at least a basic native accelerated 2D driver which doesn't depend on all the horrible proprietary crack, which would be fine for a lot of people. The 3D and video playback acceleration features are nice, but not essential. It'd be nice if Intel would just kick out a driver like that, at least. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
