On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 10:59 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote: > On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 13:05 +0100, valent.turkovic@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > I'm really interested what is the state of gma500_gfx driver in latest > > kernel, is it reasonable to expect that this driver will get updated > > and have better support or should I just say to my friend to grab > > version of Windows 7 and to run with it... any suggestions? > > Intel's PowerVR-based graphics have _terrible_ support in Linux. > They've been promising for years to either a) provide a competent free > driver and/or b) stop producing pvr-based chipsets, and they have > repeatedly failed at both. > > There is no OSS 3D driver for these chips, which is unfortunate, since > 3D is the only thing these chips do even remotely well, and they're > inevitably attached to underpowered CPUs where llvmpipe isn't going to > help much. There's a KMS driver that vaguely works kinda sometimes, as > you've found, but that just lights up the display, it doesn't provide > any acceleration. > > I do not expect support for these chips to get materially better any > time soon. Honestly at this point I don't even want to reverse engineer > the things, it would essentially be rewarding Intel for bad behaviour. I would never usually suggest any of the things in this post, but if you're really stuck with Poulsbo hardware, you essentially have zero good choices, so it's just a case of which bad choice you want to make. Note that several years ago there was a proprietary driver which, while in many ways being a pile of crap, more or less worked and gave 2D, 3D and video playback acceleration. Whoever was maintaining it gave up years ago, and you have 0 chance of getting it to work on any modern distro, but you may be able to use it if you run an old LTS build of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 10.04 should be old enough for the proprietary driver to work, and still has support until mid-2015 according to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS . Of course, the rest of the environment will be from the middle of 2010. You could run an equally old build of any other distribution too, of course, but few will have any support at this point, and you'll likely be able to find old guide/howto threads for running the GMA500 proprietary drivers on Ubuntu more easily than any other distro. If you want to go this route, the best thing to do is probably to start Googling or searching the Ubuntu forums (where Poulsbo-proprietary-driver-folk-wisdom tends to reside) with the magic string 'emgd'. AFAIK none of the two or three different proprietary drivers put out by different groups at Intel (yes...really) for the Poulsbo has been maintained at all since 2011 or so, and you have no effective chance of getting any of them working on distros with Xorg 1.10 or newer and/or kernel 3.0 or newer. For anything modern you're stuck with vesa or the gma500_gfx kernel driver and xorg-x11-drv-modesetting, which will be barely any better than vesa, and both of which will be extremely sluggish. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
