Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

minibox
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed May 13, 2009 7:53 am

Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by minibox »

Hi

Any clue as to when the Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04) will be sorted - need to up the refresh rate to 60 or 75 (if there is another way to do it - please let me know) - we have loaded repositories and did all updates nothing seems to work.

Mini-Box
Carlo

irads

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by irads »

We do not have a firm commitment from Intel on that, but will keep you posted as soon as there are news. 8.10 is proved to work with the latest drivers refresh, hopefully 9.04 is not very far off.

minibox
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed May 13, 2009 7:53 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by minibox »

So should we go back to 8.10 for now ? How can we make sure the driver is correct on 8.10 and is it 8.10 desktop or netbook

irads

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by irads »

I would recommend 8.10 when we release the distribution. Until then we recommend 8.04.

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by prj »

I'm working on getting the drivers to work with Jaunty (no promises though). Since I don't have a FIT-PC2 I haven't been able to do any testing.

The driver consists of several parts:
* The psb LKM and a special version of the drm LKM (both compiles in 9.04)
* A firmware image (msvdx_fw.bin)
* A modified version of libdrm (compiles in 9.04)
* The xorg 2D driver (compiles but unsure if it loads into xorg)
* The closed source xorg GLX (3D and Xv support) driver

I've started reversing the GLX part and so far it looks good (but there is still much work to be done). If Intel (or tungsten) doesn't supply us with a decent driver then reversing is the only solution. If anyone would like to try getting this to work (some skills are needed) or perhaps do some reverse engineering I'll be glad to help.

minibox
Posts: 6
Joined: Wed May 13, 2009 7:53 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by minibox »

Hi PJR

TX - yes we need it to work ASAP - please contact Carlo or Christiaan

www.mini-box.co.za

TX

CArlo

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by prj »

Hey Carlo/minibox,
have you checked your PM?

Cheers

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by prj »

I finally managed to get the psb driver working (kind of) with 9.04. The 3D binary blob doesn't work since it's not compiled for Jaunty. This makes the driver pretty slow (but I'm kinda pushing it at 1920x1200). There is also some screen artifacts and every now and then the system freezes. The driver can't read the EDID so I had to specify monitor stuff in the xorg.conf manually.

One thing I haven't figured out is how much memory there is on the card. The driver seems to detects 8MiB :shock:

At the moment the driver is pretty useless. Too many bugs to be of any use. I'll keep digging in the source but it's pretty hard to make any sense of it without any real documentation.

prj
Posts: 90
Joined: Tue May 12, 2009 9:13 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by prj »

Just a quick status update...

I've resolved most of the problems with the PSB driver for 9.04. The freezes was solved by disabling C-states in the BIOS (GV3 works fine). This wasn't at all related to the psb driver. The flickering has also disappeared. Unfortunately there are problems with the driver when HT is enabled. They manifest in complete lockups of X. Disabling HT in the BIOS is a temporary solution to this problem. Otherwise it's now working fine and is much faster then the VESA driver (but still slower than the 8.04 which has 3D). Video playback with Xv seems to be working but it cannot handle full HD.

I forgot to mention that the driver I'm using is based on the source code found at http://www.happyassassin.net/2009/05/13 ... fedora-10/

Win XP states that there are 256MB of mem on the card, which is the maximum supported for the Intel GMA 500.

I'm gonna try to put a Ubuntu package together so more people can test it. Someone might find it useful until we get proper drivers from Intel.

tisoft_media
Posts: 16
Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2009 8:40 am

Re: Poulsbo Drivers for GMA500 intel chip on Jaunty (9.04)

Post by tisoft_media »

I would be more than happy to help you test. :)

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