Intel's Medfield Still A Botched Binary Mess Under Linux?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Medfield Still A Botched Binary Mess Under Linux?

While the next-generation Ivy Bridge hardware may not be shown off this week at CES2012 (in public that is, in private that's a different story), what Intel and their partners will be promoting heavily this week in Las Vegas is their "Medfield" platform. But how well supported under Linux is this next-generation Intel mobile platform? Are there going to be more binary blobs coming out for Linux?..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTAzOTI

[benjamin545]

This was a really tough article to read, ya you spell checked it, but god, it just had no flow and it felt like sentences were stretched really had just to fit in your links to other articles. maybe for large, mostly technical articles like this, you should just stick to bullet points and lists. If you still want to have all your links to your other articles, just make a list at the bottom and throw them all in there. That way you can give a little more descriptive link text to an article than just "fucked up", also, it might give the article a little more professional feeling.

[AnonymousCoward]

Had Intel not been so quick to abandon MeeGo for the fucked-up Tizen vaporware

Vaporware? I'm not sure about that.

Tizen reference kernel supports ARM cortex A8 architecture and is well tuned to Tizen reference device from Samsung Electronics, which is planned to be distributed in February 2012. Reference kernel is based on Linux kernel 2.6.36.

http://source.tizen.org/source/release.html

[curaga]

The "shouting open source" link is wrong (<a hreff)

[remm]

You should stop using "crap", "mess", etc in your article titles ... Seriously.

[Wyatt]

Because the overall tone of this barely-coherent screed just screams "buttfrustrated". I mean, my god, man! You'd think Intel is actively hunting down driver developers and going Highlander on them.

It's one thing to be honest in your assessment of a poor situation, but to crucify a product that's not even out yet is just bad form and harms your (Phoronix's) reputation.

[darkbasic]

Bottle openers

[Michael]

Because the overall tone of this barely-coherent screed just screams "buttfrustrated". I mean, my god, man! You'd think Intel is actively hunting down driver developers and going Highlander on them.

It's one thing to be honest in your assessment of a poor situation, but to crucify a product that's not even out yet is just bad form and harms your (Phoronix's) reputation.

It was only my first coffee of the day when writing this piece this morning... But yes, frustrating as well, especially when spending an hour last night trying to explain the Linux driver situation to another media person. When Intel will quote me in their press briefings yet not invite me to those briefings themselves, yet I'm the one that ends up getting contacted by other people for Linux clarifications when the Intel PR people don't know/understand something concerning Linux support. The same also largely goes for AMD.

[grege]

If you owned a GMA500 device you would be "buttfrustrated" too.

Michael, please keep shouting until Intel fix the mess they created. The only good thing is that my Dell Mini 12 will die eventually and I can never, ever, get another notebook with an unsupported chipset. I have been stuck with using Xubuntu and shoehorning in the EMGD driver. At least there is a vibrant community (with an Ubuntu PPA) effort to make GMA500 work with each new release. But, it is getting harder for them each time as they have to trick the system into thinking an old version of Xorg is actually newer than the one shipped with the distro. My Xubuntu 11.10 works well enough with 2d and video acceleration, and enough 3d (OpenGL 1.2) to let the Xfce desktop have a few effects. You can forget Gnome3. And you have to know what you are doing just to boot and install on the hardware. The new poulsbo-gfx driver will, at least, make that a little easier.

[gururise]

I have an Acer AspireOne. What a big mistake it was to buy that netbook. I bought it back when it first came out a few years ago, thinking that MeeGo would support it, since its an ATOM notebook. The only information/updates I have received in all these years is from Phoronix. So I very much appreciate Michael's pushing Intel on this issue.

We have waited years for descent support. We got a binary driver a few years back, but thats never been updated, and with each new kernel release and new release of X.org/Mesa, the old driver keeps breaking. It is very frustrating as a user. Even Windows support on the Poulsbo platform is god-awful, with multiple drivers, each supporting a different subset of features, but at least with Windows you get working 3d (sort-of) without hacks.

It's too bad, the PowerVR hardware is good. But the driver situation is a terrible mess. I will never ever buy another ATOM/Poulsbo again.