Intel Wants YOUR Linux Questions, Feedback

[gQuigs]

For the gallium discussion. Intel is about to be the first one to hit OpenGL 3.x using the older mesa... wasn't Gallium supposed to make getting there faster?

To Intel, I noticed that you do some good internal testing (http://intellinuxgraphics.org/testing.html) on every release. Any chance of a collaboration with phoronix test suite?
It seems like it might be useful to do something similar to (Daily Kernel Tracker) as well.

thanks!
Bryan

[Veerappan]

But then when a hardware manuf. goes off and does their own driver which they release fully open source, some people in the community has a fit and wants to force the manuf. to use something they didn't want to use.

It's not right, all I'm sayin'. If you want the Intel driver in Gallium, port it yourself. As the Intel rep stated earlier, there is no benefit in doing so and they haven't yet heard any compelling reasons from the community that would justify a port to gallium.

Why are so many people giving Intel a hard time about using their "Freedom" when they chose not to use Gallium? Would it be just as appropriate for me to go to a KDE project and tell them they should use Gnome or vice-versa?

I'm not saying that Intel have to use Gallium. I'm just saying that there'd probably be less duplicated effort between drivers if everyone was using the same infrastructure.

If everyone was using gallium, we'd have the state trackers up front doing the API thing, and then the drivers would just need to do a back-end TGSI/LLVM-IR/whatever to hardware layer. If we wanted to have OpenCL on intel/nouveau/radeon, all we'd need at that point is an OpenCL state tracker. At that point, any driver which implements all of the necessary TGSI opcodes could support OpenCL. Same with the D3D10/11 state tracker, GL ES(1/2), OpenVG, and others. Yes, all of the drivers that want to support a given state tracker will have to implement all of the necessary opcodes and report that they support that feature, but at least we won't need multiple front-end parsers/interfaces for each type of language/feature we want to support.

I am deeply appreciative of what Intel's been doing. They have provided us with a new GLSL compiler, GL3 compatibility, and many other new features in Mesa. These are things which benefit anyone who is using the Mesa stack. That's awesome. I'd just love to see the work that Intel is doing continue to benefit the entire stack (yes, it's selfish), as I don't have Intel graphics in all of my machines.

[crazycheese]

This is the one thing that I find hypocritical about the linux community that drives me up the wall being part of the linux community myself... It's ok to have a bajillion different window managers and forks of all sorts of projects all over the place (libreoffice / openoffice, Trinity / KDE,etc. etc.)..

But then when a hardware manuf. goes off and does their own driver which they release fully open source, some people in the community has a fit and wants to force the manuf. to use something they didn't want to use.

No one is forcing Intel, it is called customer opinion and sane world producers listen to their customers.

And you are confusing fork with "another implementation of".
The only real duplicate in linux world are xine and gstreamer, and people feel about both just same they feel about this saga.

[Sidicas]

I'd just love to see the work that Intel is doing continue to benefit the entire stack (yes, it's selfish), as I don't have Intel graphics in all of my machines.

It's more than selfish, it could be harmful to Intel.. They're a business, they're expected to work to increase their own sales and not the sales of other companies. Intel could quickly lose a lot of investment money if they start spending that money on things that help their competitors make sales.

If you want to vote with your wallet and not buy or use Intel products because they didn't make their open source driver part of Gallium, that's perfectly fine.. But you need to understand, that Intel is betting that people won't be doing that. So they get the benefit of not helping their competitors (increased sales of their products), and they're betting that people are going to decide to use the open source driver whether it's part of Gallium or not.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me.. And I think it's going to work out very well.. It really shows that companies can be competitive *AND* open source at the same time.. Even though the community might want to see all these competitors work together and help each other make sales, it's unlikely that will ever happen because when a consumer buys a competitor's product, it's lost money.

[Kiori]

Are we ever going to have GUI editing tools for driver options, in the likes of the windows variant for linux?

I mean i know intel has its ons and ons against it, but all the cool guys are doing it(nvidia, amd). Often times i see intel devs saying: 'Well actually our drivers have a lot of interesting -options- that most users --dont-- know about'... o'really? guess why?

This might seem anti-linux for some, but it would be really useful, specially as linux grows in adoption.
I fact I would dare say Intel appears very distant towards its users, i believe that is a side effect of non-binary existence and easy of use through kernel no fuss reliability, and its intended, but it still needs to change and improve, hence the GUI request, which could have many options that would link the user to intel(like the bug report question mentioned earlier).

My 2 cents.

cheers

[Veerappan]

If you want to vote with your wallet and not buy or use Intel products because they didn't make their open source driver part of Gallium, that's perfectly fine..

Everything that you've said makes sense, and I have been voting with my wallet. Every machine that I have purchased/built over the last 2 years has had OpenCL capabilities at the switch of a driver. If intel doesn't support this, I'll keep buying something that can. Eventually gallium will be able to handle OpenCL, and my radeon machines can stop using fglrx. Intel will have a lot more work to do to support the same feature that and/nouveau will be able to share effort on.

Yes, Intel doesn't want to help competitor. Supporting gallium might cost them a few sales (maybe), but it could also ease their development burden and save them money on long term maintenance while making their drivers more able to adapt to new requirements/features.

[Kivada]

It's not right, all I'm sayin'. If you want the Intel driver in Gallium, port it yourself. As the Intel rep stated earlier, there is no benefit in doing so and they haven't yet heard any compelling reasons from the community that would justify a port to gallium.

You're missing out the one detail there, theres no direct gain for Intel in using Gallium3D, because if they did there would be a faster turnaround time for new features for the Radeon and Nouveau drivers if Intel ran on the same stack.

the other gain might be in better long term support, since Intel's team has a history of ignoring hardware older then 3 years. Most of the developing world are using 3rd hand comps, should they be forced to track down long out of date distros with horribly unpatched software or pirate Windows just to make the machines usable?

[Tundra]

Answered one of my questions, but ignored the part about OpenCL. Answered many other questions, but ignored all about OpenCL.

You could say "I don't know", or "I can't talk about that", but instead you keep ignoring them. Why ask for questions if you don't want to answer them?

I know Intel's gpus aren't very powerfull, and maybe there isn't enough power to make them interesting for OpenCL, but it's something many people have asked for.

[bogus]

According to this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_HD_Graphics only Ivy Bridge have hardware OpenCL support. Without hardware support I think there's nothing drivers can do about.

[aelo]

I'm thinking about buying a Thinkpad T430s when it's out. I read that Ivy Bridge supports 4K Output over DisplayPort in Windows. Will this also be possible on Linux? (I might also buy an external monitor when the first cheap 4K Monitors are available.)

thank's in advance
It's really awesome seeing that developers care so much about the users .