Linux users: watch out for last-gen Intel Atom
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
I must say i am really disappointed by Intel, which (in my oppinion) had and have great Linux support in their products. But not in this one.
Stay away from Atoms with non-Intel Graphics.
i wouldn't count them so happily as linux supporters.
That's a little unfair. They might suck at 3-d immersive games, but some of us do not want to play 3-d immersive games, and the GPU integrated into my Core i5 does everything I want it to except perhaps smoothly play 1080p video. (720p playback OTOH works flawlessly.)
(from someone who once ported flash to a smartphone and saw the code and all)
Disclaimer: I'm starting at Intel on the open source graphics team next month.
It has seemed to me that using these PVR chips has always been a stop gap measure for Atom until the in-house graphics were ready (where ready means sufficiently energy efficient or something). This seems to be confirmed by the fact that ValleyView graphics are going to be coming to Atom.
If all linux drivers would work as flawlessly as the intel graphics drivers, that would be awesome :)
(Of course it would be great if the Wifi driver would be completely open source as well!)
All wifi cards nowadays depend on a binary blob. Some of them depend on that being uploaded by the computer.
>> i wouldn't count them so happily as linux supporters.
Their support is certainly above average and they usually go the extra mile in supporting (except in PowerVR case of course)
Other vendors are much worse
How did you get your system to run, if you don't mind me asking?
In any case the poor experience of this system is what have made me aim for a AMD or at least clean (as in no NVIDIA or other chips) Intel system for my next machine.
I use bumblebee, acpi_call and bbswitch. with that I can launches processes that use the nvidia chip by pretending a command, for example "optirun ioquake3". that launches a secondary x server and using virtualgl streams the frames to my primary one. works quite well!
edit: darn, replied to the wrong comment.
See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_...
Just don't bother with it.
And sorry, I can't find much reasons to praise it
Wish Imagination would solve this problem by open-sourcing some proper drivers.
Because most of the performance woes will be bad driver integration, and world will be wowed by a decent driver making the SGX punch, as it does, above its weight.
† I recall playing Quake 3 Arena on it on Linux, with framerate matching or exceeding Windows'.
These chips don't even have gpu drivers for Windows 7 x64. You have to run the 32-bit version, which is strange since the boards all support >4GB ram.
Another interesting thing to note is that the D2700 is already EOL'd [1] - i don't know when this happened exactly, but it can't have had more than 6 months on the market - and Intel have extended embedded production on the previous generation 5xx chips(?).
All the meaningful parts of the 3D engine (shader compiler, GPU code generator, etc...) are in userspace (in prebuilt binaries for MeeGo). The kernel doesn't do anything but take the output from those components and hand it to the hardware to execute.
I think I remember being told about a project to reverse engineer the SGX, but doubt it's made much progress. Even Nouveau is just barely usable for 3D now, and that's for much more accessible (and desirable) hardware.
Not necessarily. The idea behind clean room development is that one part of the team uses whatever legal techniques they want to analyse software, and document everything they discover. The documents are checked to make sure they don't contain any copyrightable information from the original (if information is not copyrightable, the methods used to obtain that information, be it decompiling or analysis of behaviour don't matter). A different team, who hasn't seen the original software at all, work off the document that doesn't contain any copyrightable information from the original.
By the way, isn't atom all about Linux
And for "high-end" CPUs/SoCs like IvyBridge or SandyBridge, you're good to go.
So no: Cedar Trail is a poor platform to use for linux if you want accelerated graphics (but there are some cheap boards I'm looking at that seem really attractive for hobby projects). But it's not Intel becoming "more evil", they're just shipping the same stuff.
There will be a Valley View chip out later this year which goes back to Intel Graphics. Is that evidence of Intel becoming "less evil"?
Intel's community support on the SGX is no better or worse than Apple's or Google's or Samsung's. They support the OSes they want, which in this case means Windows and Linux i686 ("MeeGo" libraries are compatible with basically any modern distro -- try them). They're not free drivers, because no drivers for this part are free.
Intel which is supposed to be a good citizen does not think twice when it comes to betray Linux support, and the same can be said for any other company.
We expunged linux, booted Windows(!), it asked for drivers ("Have disk?" Yes!) and everything up and running in minutes.
And we were developing new Infiniband code FOR LINUX! For testing we ran a virtual machine booting linux - that worked of course.
Moral: until Linux has a "Have disk" button, I don't see it deploying successfully on production machines. In a hobbyists garage, sure. But not mainstream. For all the reasons listed in other posts here.
And, well, if you buy hardware from shoddy vendors, don't expect it to work with every OS. For me personally Linux has always worked decently out-of-the-box, and outperformed Windows with a bit of tinkering. (I admit I never bothered to do tinkering in Windows though. I don't know if you can, and how much can be done.)
This would work only if you could get Linux drivers on a disk. There's a better solution that both Linux and Windows have had for years: put the drivers in a repo. Vista and 7 will grab drivers from their repository and install them automatically. Linux does the same. But only if the manufacturer has drivers for it.
Bought up-to-date computers for my team. Linux fan suggested we develop on linux. Tried it - disaster. Didn't support video chip, raid controller, even all the memory. Open office tools crashed. First doc I imported displayed in upper-left corner of the screen, every character in the file in one big spiderey blob.
That's the problem, there was no driver support. That's not the fault of Linux, that's the fault of companies not making drivers for Linux. If the hardware maker supplies Linux drivers, they're installed automatically while the system is installing, seamlessly.
I don't see it deploying successfully on production machines
Then you're blind, because it's on millions of production machines around the world. We're a Windows shop and even we have hundreds of Linux servers and desktops.
Compare your 'millions' with the what, half a billion Windows machines, and you make the point very well.
I think you make my point just as well, you're just directing blame at the wrong people. The problem you and I both see is a lack of Linux drivers. Rather than blaming the Linux developers though, I'm blaming the people responsible for making their drivers Windows-only, as well as making them closed-source binaries so Linux developers cannot make it work on their own.