Lots of Changes for Intel Graphics Coming in Linux 3.9 102
With the Linux 3.8 merge over, the Intel Linux graphics developers are looking toward 3.9. From a weblog entry by one of them: "Let's first look at bit at the drm core changes: The headline item this time around is the reworked kernel modeset locking. Finally the kernel doesn't stall for a few frames while probing outputs in the background! ... For general robustness of our GEM implementation we've clarified the various gpu reset state transitions. This should prevent applications from crashing while a gpu reset is going on due to the kernel leaking that transitory state to userspace. Ville Syrjälä also started to fix up our handling of pageflips across gpu hangs so that compositors no longer get stuck after a reset. Unfortunately not all of his patches made it into 3.9. Somewhat related is Mika Kuoppala's work to fix bugs across the seqnqo wrap-around. And to make sure that those bugs won't pop up again he also added some testing infrastructure. "
The thing I am most looking forward to is the gen4 relocation regression finally being fixed. No more GPU hangs when under heavy I/O load (the bane of my existence for a while now). The bug report is a good read if you think hunting for a tricky bug is fun.
If intel went into discrete graphics (Score:4, Interesting)
I think they'd take over the linux graphics-card market. Maybe not much of a market now, but potentially could be big enough to justify doing it.
GPU reset, Windows users should be so lucky (Score:4, Interesting)
Since Vista, the Windows OS deals with this by chatting with the graphics,
if the graphics doesn't reply in a reasonable amount of time the OS will reset the program.
Playing an intensive game like Battle Field 3 this tends to happen a lot. The video
card is too busy and doesn't have the time to chat; so the game just goes away.
Your either at your desktop like nothing is wrong other than not playing a game anymore,
or staring at the last graphics frame shown with a hard reset in your future.
VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE is what one error calls itself and fixed by disabling the "Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR)."
Key added here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers then disabled.
I have a write up about this in my journal but it's not worth reading, it's wordy and doesn't flow a bit. .DMP file that managed to be written before the OS
A better write up is here http://mikemstech.blogspot.com/2011/12/troubleshooting-0x116-videotdrerror.html [blogspot.com]
a site I found after running a debug on the one (single)
became unresponsive.
Re:can I buy an intel video card yet? (Score:5, Interesting)
I hate to say it but Nvidia is making it happen now. They've managed to make installing graphics drivers totally painless. Hell it's easier than Windows! I'd love an open source driver that works but unfortunately I can choose AMD and have shitty graphics speed or I can fly with Nvidia. My religion just isn't strong enough.