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Many linux users who bought early netbooks with Intel GMA Poulsbo GPUs |
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ended up kicking themselves in the rear. If you got rid of yours, you |
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may end up kicking yourself in the rear even more. According to |
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http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/linux-gma500-poulsbo-driver-moved-out-of-staging/ |
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|
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================================================================== |
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Good news for people with an Intel GMA500 (Poulsbo) graphics card, |
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support is now in the mainline Linux kernel. |
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|
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In the Linux 3.3-rc1 (mainline) kernel the driver has moved out of |
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staging and re-named. |
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|
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It is now located under |
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|
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Device Drivers -> |
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Graphics support -> |
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DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) -> |
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Intel GMA5/600 KMS Framebuffer |
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|
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and is now called "gma500_gfx". |
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|
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Once the kernel team with your distribution of choice makes the |
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adjustment, the GMA500 should work "out of the box" on any Linux |
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Distribution using kernel 3.3 or higher. |
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================================================================== |
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|
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Since the latest stable gentoo-sources is 3.2.21, I keyworded 3.3.8 |
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and ran "emerge --sync" on my brick^H^H^H^H old netbook and built the |
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kernel with the options indicated above. |
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|
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***IMPORTANT*** I had to emerge x11-drivers/xf86-video-fbdev as the |
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X11 video driver. I believe that x11-drivers/xf86-video-psb is the old |
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deprecated Poulsbo driver... and I never could get the bleeping thing to |
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build anyways. |
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|
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Initial quick review... |
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1) It woiks!!! The netbook is now displaying 1366x768. |
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|
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2) No xorg.conf required. And udev is not sniffing anything out, |
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because the machine is running on mdev. |
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|
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3) Performance is decent for an early Atom. I used Youtube for |
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quick-n-dirty torture testing... |
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- 480p Youtube videos are OK, even at fullscreen |
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- 720p Youtube videos are OK on the standard player and large player, |
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but stutter slightly at fullscreen |
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- 1080p - fuggedaboutit |
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4) Getting brightness control, etc, to work is still hit-and-miss. |
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5) Hibernate (suspend-to-disk) does not work. Reading comments at the |
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blog, that appears to be a known problem with the GPU and the kernel |
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driver. |
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|
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-- |
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Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> |
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