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Intel Open Sources Graphics Drivers

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Aug 09, 2006 06:02 PM
from the running-scared-from-amd-ati dept.
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."
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[+] Backslash: Wireless, Gaming Addiction, Spam, and More 45 comments
Of the thousands of comments on yesterday's Slashdot page, gathered below are some of the ones that defined the conversations on the rise of wireless peripherals, the meaning of content-free spam, whether one can be truly addicted to online gaming, and Intel's move to open source some of its graphics adapter drivers. Read on for the Backslash summary.
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  • Now... (Score:5, Funny)

    by infosec_spaz (968690) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:05PM (#15876992) Homepage
    If only a company who makes GOOD graphics cards would do the same!
    • Re:Now... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jambarama (784670) <jambaramaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday August 09 2006, @09:51PM (#15878013) Homepage Journal
      Actually, ATI/AMD is talking about open-sourcing [infoworld.com] their drivers too. nVidia already has pretty functional GNU/Linux drivers (albeit closed source), so with these other two GNU/Linux could finally have the support it needs to be a viable desktop alternative.

      Now if only we could get some open sourced drivers for higher end sound cards and more obscure wireless cards.
    • Re:Now... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jmv (93421) on Thursday August 10 2006, @12:34AM (#15878536) Homepage
      See, the interesting thing is that I wouldn't be surprised if *on Linux" the Intel cards end up beating ATI and NVidia just because of the drivers. I've got ATI cards in both my laptops and I'm not impressed by the speed with the open-source drivers (and I'm unwilling to live with all the trouble involved in the closed-source ones). I'm sure a machine with an Intel chipset and open-source drivers could easily beat both ATI and NVidia on Linux.
  • by thre5her (223254) <taddism&subdimension,com> on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:06PM (#15877004) Homepage
    Hopefully AMD/ATI will compete by open-sourcing the drivers for their integrated chipsets. Some healthy competition would definitely help the Linux desktop.
    • by FlipmodePlaya (719010) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:16PM (#15877055) Journal
      http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446 [osnews.com] Looks like they're at least considering it.
      • by Mr. Jaggers (167308) <jaggerz.gmail@com> on Wednesday August 09 2006, @07:11PM (#15877335) Homepage
        That's a stupid excuse, though. They could always isolate the SGI-laden parts, LGPL the rest, and let the community at least have a fighting chance at replacing what's behind the proprietary API's. I'm not claiming that our homebrew routines would *ever* be better, but I suppose it is within the realm of possibility. Oh, and when I say "always", I do really mean *always*... at any point, even right this minute, they could do so.

        The non-licensed parts of the code don't have to compile to be released. Besides, when bugs are traced back into the dark proprietary code, that would also make ATI the good guys and SGI the bad guys. ATI could claim that the licensed part is really fast and awesome and sweet, but proprietary, and that the community is welcome to try and replace it with something fast and awesome and
        sweet, but open. Or even something slow and crappy, but rock-solid stable, that plays nice with Xorg and the kernel.

        I suppose they might have licensed other companies code and signed away their right to ever release any code they ever write that uses the licensed bits. That would be a collosal blunder, but would partially account for silence on the subject.

        I'm fairly certain that the real reason lies not the code ATI has licensed, but the code/tech they've worked hard on and feel they need to keep secret or else lose their edge against nVidia. Of course, it seems that same statement could be made, swapping the names of the two companies, and still be true. In fact, the "trade secret" and "intellectual property" argument is almost certainly the biggest reason for closed-source driver code. Besides, how can a company who is losing money afford to give anything away for free? At least it always seems like the investors and board of directors of tech companies seem to believe that they are perpetually bleeding cash, even when they file record profits with the SEC.

        Anyway, that's quite enough ranting and unsubstantiated libel for one post.
        • by Cyno (85911) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @08:13PM (#15877652) Journal
          I agree, and most people don't need anything faster than an Intel 955, even the 855 is good enough for 90% of desktop use minus modern 3D gaming. They play quake just fine. What more does one NEED, honestly? ATI and nVidia better wake up or they may soon find a new real competitor on the block.

          I bought Intel graphics with my laptop. At first I wasn't pleased with the performance, but then I got to testing it directly. I can easily get 30 fps in OpenGL for simple geometries. Its really not that bad. They doubled the performance since, and I'm sure their latest stuff is most useable. Can you imagine what they'll come out with next?

          I didn't like Intel, but lately they've been attracting my pocketbook more than any other anti-FOSS businesses. As far as I'm concerned if they aren't pro-FOSS by now, they're anti-FOSS. They know just as well as I do what its all about. Microsoft, no matter how much they say they support it, is obviously fighting it tooth and nail behind closed doors.
        • by Andy Dodd (701) <atd7NO@SPAMcornell.edu> on Wednesday August 09 2006, @11:06PM (#15878270) Homepage
          "That's a stupid excuse, though. They could always isolate the SGI-laden parts, LGPL the rest, and let the community at least have a fighting chance at replacing what's behind the proprietary API's. I'm not claiming that our homebrew routines would *ever* be better, but I suppose it is within the realm of possibility. Oh, and when I say "always", I do really mean *always*... at any point, even right this minute, they could do so."
          They tried that. After a while it Simply Didn't Work - It's not just SGI, and in fact the particular issue that I remember was support for S3 Texture Compression, aka S3TC. For whatever reason, the licensing of S3TC prevented them from ever supporting it in an open-source driver.

          ATI started releasing binary-only drivers for Linux shortly after the UT2003 S3TC support fiasco. (In short, UT2K3 would only run on NVidia cards under Linux because they were the only ones that supported S3TC under Linux.)
  • first reaction: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mihalis (28146) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:11PM (#15877033) Homepage
    Fantastic. Great work Intel. This puts your products in a different, more positive light for me personally. This could be really good for X11. I worked with it for about 10 years and have been very despondent about its chance in a world of proprietary drivers from ATI and NVIDIA being the only way to use modern graphics hardware. Maybe there's a chance for open source desktop after all.
  • by Rob Y. (110975) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:15PM (#15877052)
    The argument against nVidia and ATI opening up their drivers was always that it would give other vendors a headstart in cloning their chipsets. They'd be able to tell how they work (from a hardware API level at least), and have a driver ready to go if they copied that API.

    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?
    • by l2718 (514756) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:21PM (#15877079)
      Well, Intel's integrated graphics chipset is a far cry from the nVidia / ATI high-end accellerators. Cloning it will be next to useless (who'll buy a separate graphics card to replaace an on-board solution?) since most other chipset manufacturers already have on-board solutions of their own. I doubt this will change the high-end makers rationale for keeping their drivers secret.
    • by Tumbleweed (3706) * on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:26PM (#15877110) Homepage
      I'd be willing to bet the REAL reason they don't open their drivers is because they're using stuff they know is the intellectual property of others. Just a guess, though; I have no real information on this, but I'd be very surprised if they can't dig into each other's hardware under a microscope to figure out what the other guy is doing, and reverse engineer each other's drivers. These are some very smart folks we're talking about here.
      • Possibly.

        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.
  • Nice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Morkano (786068) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:16PM (#15877056)
    Nice.

    I bet they're trying to preempt AMD doing the same with an integrated ATI chip.

    Well played, Intel. Well played.
  • Linux Laptops! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by db32 (862117) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:21PM (#15877080) Journal
    Ok here is the thing...ATI and nvidia can be a bit of a pain...but on a desktop you buy one or the other and you plug it in and go. Laptops on the other hand your selection is FAR more limited and you have to juggle hardware, and more often than not, something just won't work right or well. This makes the Intel integrated laptops even more attractive now instead of the ATI/nvidia ones. I really hope they go backwards with this to and open their recent chipsets up completely as well.
  • by trb (8509) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:30PM (#15877129)
    besides the desire/preference to have open source drivers for license compliance and moral/ethical reasons, there is a more practical reason why source access to drivers is handy. sometimes you need to recompile drivers from source in order to have them play well with operating systems features. for instance, if they need to respect the constraints of real-time systems such as rtlinux, rtai, or xenomai. these systems need to redefine cli/sti (clear/set interrupt) instructions (using macros) so that the real-time micro-kernel handles the interrupts rather than linux. open source drivers let you recompile with #include files that make this possible.
  • by sweetnjguy29 (880256) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:49PM (#15877207) Journal
    I know that all of us techies turn our noses up at integrated graphic chipsets, but I think that an enormous number of computers out there, including laptops, that utilize this technology. One of the more common complaints from people switching to linux is that the monitor resolution and graphics are sucky. A BSD and GPL licenced driver solution would be perfect to help more people make the switch!
  • by Hobart (32767) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @09:24PM (#15877926) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a good on-topic thread in which to mention the freedesktop.org (X.org folks) effort to write a 100% open source 3D driver for the NVidia cards -- nouveau

    http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ [freedesktop.org]

    If you're an owner of an nVidia card, please do all you can to help contribute! They appear to be suprisingly far along.

    --
    Slashcode bug # 497457 - unfixed since December 2001 - Go look it up [sourceforge.net]!
    • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tumbleweed (3706) * on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:08PM (#15877014) Homepage
      Well, this isn't for discrete graphics cards, right - it's for the built-in graphics in the 965 family chipsets. That's my understanding, anyway.

      Still, a very nice move.
        • by Ruff_ilb (769396) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:46PM (#15877194) Homepage
          Many, MANY home users out in the field use on-board video for everything. Now, I'm not saying this'll have them all converting to an Open Source OS, but this is yet another advance that would make sending the average noob user over to Linux without any sort of performance hit.

          Taking a 180 degree turn and looking right back at your interpretation of the story, I find it very likely that Intel will be teaming up with nVidia sometime soon. Now that AMD owns ATI, Intel should be wide open to purchase nVidia if they want, and (although I'm not saying they'll need it), pairing Intel's massive resources with nVidia's enthusiast motherboard chipsets and universal video options, things could improve rapidly for the both of them. However, if Intel is going to enter the market as a third video force, that seems unlikely, although we could see Intel graphics cards interfacing well only with intel boards and intel CPUS, and the customer could likely lose if such a situation becomes possible.

          Anyway, I think I've speculated enough. The bottom line is that open-sourcing these drivers is a very interesting and likely harmless move for intel to make, and it should make the jobs of many OS coders easier in the open source OS circles.
      • by freeweed (309734) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @08:44PM (#15877789)
        You know, there's a lot more to do with a computer than play games. Especially amongst those of us that run Linux, we tend to do a lot less gameplaying than the average bear.

        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:Happy now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ruie (30480) on Wednesday August 09 2006, @06:52PM (#15877226) Homepage
      I can't say I particularly care (not using any on-board graphics)

      One area where on-board graphics is important are notebooks - especially those thin and light ones. A choice of video card is rare, especially if one cares about battery life.

      Traditionally, Linux support of new notebook video chips was very uncertain, as it is not possible to get a new notebook with a 2 year old graphics controller. Thus the fact that all-Intel notebooks are a safe choice (with not only 2d, but also 3d and wireless working under Linux) is a truly wonderful news.

      Also, the new Xserver features have to be implemented on something before there are binary blobs that support them. So having an open code to experiment with, say, Render, impacts other graphics cards as well.