Poulsbo packages for F12, F13 may be incoming

Source

The wonderful Olivier Blin of Mandriva has come through with his patches for making the psb video driver for Poulsbo (GMA 500) chipsets work on newer versions of X.org. He reports success - including 3D - with X server 1.7. I'm hoping this will mean I can provide fully-accelerated packages for Fedora 12 soon; I have to request an F12 branch in RPM Fusion, though, as I previously suppressed it to avoid anyone trying to use a driver that wouldn't work. So once that's created, I'll push the packages through. F13 is more uncertain. It has an even newer X server - 1.8 - which Olivier doesn't have to test against, so we don't know if that works. It also has a newer Mesa which Olivier believes is likely to cause problems (due to the removal of a function the psb Mesa driver calls). He has an idea for a hack to get around this, but hasn't put it in place yet. So it's possible we won't be able to get a driver for F13 at all, and if we do, it'll likely be missing 3D acceleration, at least to start with. Still, better than a kick in the teeth. There's a secondary problem with F13, which is that as far as RPM Fusion is concerned, F13 doesn't seem to exist. Fusion Rawhide is tracking Fedora Rawhide, which - under No Frozen Rawhide - is F14, not F13. There is no F13 branch in Fusion. So as far as I can tell, at present, there's just no way for me to provide F13 packages in RPM Fusion. It's very difficult for me to provide packages *outside* of RPM Fusion too, because I rely on the akmods system for packaging the kernel module, and that lives in RPM Fusion; with there being no F13 branch of RPM Fusion, there's no F13 akmods configuration - there's nowhere to source a set of the necessary packages from RPM Fusion for the akmods system to work. So, yeah, that sucks. Will report back if the situation improves!

Comments

Eric Piel wrote on 2010-04-27 09:47:
Just as a warming, I'm using it with Mandriva cooker on a Dell mini 10, and the icons are not displayed, it crashes as soon as you use Firefox, and plugging an external output in freezes the machine. So for now it's not as stable as with xserver 1.6, to say the least...
adamw wrote on 2010-04-27 22:55:
Thanks for the note, Eric. Olivier did mention there's problems with newer versions of Mesa, which may well include what's in Cooker (I don't know, I don't follow Cooker much any more). You may have more luck disabling DRI entirely in the X config file, perhaps?
Links 27/4/2010: NVIDIA 195.36.24 Linux Driver, KDE Desktops Made Avatar | Techrights wrote on 2010-04-27 22:09:
[...] Poulsbo packages for F12, F13 may be incoming The wonderful Olivier Blin of Mandriva has come through with his patches for making the psb video driver for Poulsbo (GMA 500) chipsets work on newer versions of X.org. He reports success – including 3D – with X server 1.7. [...]
Eric Piel wrote on 2010-04-28 08:51:
I have mesa-7.8.1 (from cooker), which do have the commit which Olivier said was causing the problem, so I guess it's somehow expectable. Actually, I always keep DRI disabled, otherwise it freezes at start. I tried removing the Xpsb module, but that didn't help. Disabling the acceleration, with "NoAccel", did fix the main problems! However, with this option it has no video acceleration, and still crashes when plugging an external monitor.
adamw wrote on 2010-04-28 12:25:
NoAccel turns of 2D acceleration, not 3D acceleration, so it seems like your problem is in the 2D accel somehow...:/
koukou73gr wrote on 2010-04-28 23:13:
Amen. Somebody is working on this again. THANK you guys!
Jose Bernardo wrote on 2010-05-08 08:27:
Hi, I'm working with others in trying to get this working on Ubuntu. Right now we are at a similar position as Eric, as bitmaps aren't displayed properly, and the server crashes frequently. Our backtraces are unfortunately incomplete, as the ubuntu lucid xorg debug symbol packages have problems. But seem to point to something called from libpixman. If you want to follow our progress and maybe change ideas on how to fix this, we have a repository at http://code.google.com/p/gma500, and we have been changing ideas at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9259918 It would be nice if we could fix this for all our distros, as Intel seems to have abandoned the psb driver and is aiming the next version of the IEGD at xorg 1.8.
adamw wrote on 2010-05-08 11:47:
Hi Jose - for sure it'd be good to work together, obviously we should pull in Olivier who wrote the patches. I honestly haven't had any time to work on this since writing the blog post, too busy with the Fedora 13 release crunch, but I'll try and get around to looking at it soon.
Jose Bernardo wrote on 2010-05-12 15:55:
Hi adam, Right now we managed to get a "stable" X if we add the option "ShadowFB" "true" to xorg.conf, and that has the side effect of breaking 3d and video acceleration. But 2D is working. We have a repository here - http://code.google.com/p/gma500/, if you want to check how we are patching the drivers.
Isaac Fischer wrote on 2010-05-12 18:25:
Any word on what's going on with the rpmfusion F12 updates-testing repo? And thanks for your excellent work!
rpxa2873f8423e5db629e01312454b566e1 wrote on 2010-05-30 14:49:
Hi, Adam. May I ask, if there is any news on RPM packages for Fedora 12|13 for Poulsbo video? If not on RPMForge, where else can I download those packages? Thanks in advance.
PehJota wrote on 2010-06-11 21:44:
Well I found the RPMs for Fedora 12 and 13 at http://adamwill.fedorapeople.org/, and I learned the hard way that the psb driver in fact does not work in F12, lol (X server 1.7.1 reports that the driver is compiled for X server 1.6.99.1 and simply hangs while trying to set it up). I installed F13 to a flash drive last night and I'm trying to install these drivers to it (since I saw separate F13 drivers on that site). I'm running into trouble though, as kmod-psb is compiled for kernel 2.6.33.2-57 and F13 is running on kernel 2.6.33.3-85. I'll post back if I get anything working (i.e. maybe rebuilding kmod-psb from source). Has anyone gotten the Poulsbo drivers working under F13? Are there any status updates on support for F12/F13 (with the newer X servers and kernels)?
adamw wrote on 2010-06-12 16:08:
Don't use those .src.rpm's, they're old. Yes, we have psb working on f13, but right now only on my laptop, and without 3D acceleration or video playback acceleration. we're hopeful of getting a fix for that soon, and then I'll try and upload the packages to RPM Fusion. if you want to play with this yourself, use the .src.rpms from RPM Fusion, not the ones from my old repo. I'll probably take that down to avoid confusion.
PehJota wrote on 2010-06-13 01:11:
Ah, okay, thanks. I came across your more recent post on this (http://www.happyassassin.net/2010/05/21/video-acceleration-and-poulsbo-news/), and it does look promising and I'd like to get a chance to try it out on my end. Unfortunately though, RPM Fusion seems to be having website issues. download1.rpmfusion.org has been down since yesterday, so the repositories are inaccessible. I reported it in their Bugzilla a few hours ago, and now Bugzilla and most of the main rpmfusion.org site are giving 403 Forbidden errors. Are there by any chance any mirrors of these RPMs around?
M0DCM wrote on 2010-07-02 09:17:
Hey Guys, I know it's a long shot, and I've not been following the thread, but am I right in saying Fedora 12 has Poulsbo support or is it Fedora 11? I'm an Ubuntu 9.10 user and possibly one of a few that have not switched to 10.04 because of the Poulsbo problem. Just thinking of making the switch to another distro that I can use on my Acer Aspire One ZA3.