

Intel significantly speeds up graphics under Linux (X.org) - valyala
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel/commit/?id=bcef98af561939aa48d9236b2dfa2c5626adf4cb

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chaosfox
The title is a bit misleading, it sounds like its a general improvement, when
actually its a patch for the intel driver, so it only affects those that use
intel cards and this driver, or did I missed something ?

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valyala
You are correct. It looks like the patch affects only Intel graphics.

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1337p337
This is great. Now if only the newer Intel drivers didn't make X segfault!

This seems to be a common problem. I had to downgrade to 2.14.0; some bug
introduced in 2.14.903 and still present in 2.15.0 break it thoroughly. Fast
is nice, but stable is better.

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ch0wn
> Fast is nice, but stable is better.

I agree. The graphics system is basically the only part where I'm envious of
windows users. As far as I know, since vista the graphics driver can crash
without tearing down the rest of the graphical system, i. e. no data loss.

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zokier
Well, on the other hand, nVidias drivers were responsible for 30% of Vista
crashes..

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paines
So, as a Debian User, I can have use of this in 5 years.

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danieldk
Or run Debian Sid, as you ought to on the desktop ;).

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koenigdavidmj
Still more stable than half the other distributions out there

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learninglemur
[citation needed] generally people who say this haven't actually tried sid or
"other distributions"

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ori_b
I know that the plural of anecdotes is not data, but I currently run Sid, and
I have been for several years. It hasn't been problem free, but I don't recall
a system-killing update. The most common problem is some missing or broken
dependencies for a package forcing me to hold off installing a package or
updating my system for a few days.

In the mean time, back when I used to live with someone who used Ubuntu as his
main system, and when I used to run Ubuntu on my laptop, I had to fix system-
crippling bugs at least 3 times.

So, anecdotally, I've had less system-killing problems with Sid than Ubuntu's
stable releases.

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JoshTriplett
When it comes to system-killing bugs, it also matters whether you update daily
or less often; system-killing bugs often get reported right after a mirror
pulse and fixed one or two mirror pulses later (less than a day).

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etherealG
I'm struggling to understand what this means from the description, anyone mind
decoding for me?

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marshray
It's nice to see Intel cares about their X support now.

I suspect some of this is a side effect of the popularity of GPGPU computing.
If they don't want their lunch eaten by NVidia and ATI/AMD on certain
computational benchmarks, they're going to have to provide a professional
implementation of OpenCL on Linux. I suspect (am hoping) that the OpenGL
acceleration and plain X11 improvements come as part of the package.

People don't use Windows-only hardware in their supercomputers. NVidia was the
first to realize this and this is one reason they have much of the GPGPU
mindshare.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
I am skeptical of this, for two reasons. First, the GPGPU thing really hasn't
affected Intel, who still sells more units than either AMD or nVidia, and will
probably continue to have a stranglehold on their current markets. GPGPU
really doesn't matter to most people.

Second, the guy that wrote this code, Chris Wilson, is one of the big guys
behind Cairo and had an experiment, cairo-drm, where he plugged Cairo directly
to an Intel graphics chipset by talking directly to the kernel and bypassing
the Intel X drivers. His results were probably the foundation of this new
work, as far as I can guess.

~~~
marshray
Intel has been trying to get into the GPGPU business for years. The problem
for them, of course, is you have to have a credible GPU before you can GP with
it. Here's where they tried to glue together a bunch of existing cores (yes
P54C Pentiums) and call it a GPU:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_%28microarchitecture%29)
Like early experiments in aviation, it didn't fly.

I didn't know about Wilson. I'd somehow gotten the impression that this work
had been supported by Intel. Oh well. If they didn't, they shoulda. :-)

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
Intel hired Chris a couple years ago, and he has been doing awesome things
ever since. Like this SNA thing. :3

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robgough
I probably didn't follow correctly, but doesn't this only affect Sandy Bridge
processors?

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robin_reala
Nope:

 _we can take advantage of additional efficiencies, such as relative
relocations, that have been incorporated into recent hardware advances.
However, even older hardware performs better from avoiding the implicit
context switches and from the batching efficiency of the 3D pipeline..._

~~~
there
and from the results of the benchmarks listed, the best speed improvements
aren't even on sandybridge (gen6).

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smbwrs
My current laptop is a Dell C510 running Arch Linux, rocking a massive 384MB
of RAM and LXDE. It's relatively (surprisingly) snappy as is, but any
improvement is going to make a huge difference. Great work.

~~~
smbwrs
Scratch that, apparently I've got an ATI Radeon Mobility in this thing.
Regardless, still an excellent update.

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bgruber
could someone point to a source identifying the different generations of
chipset referred to in the test? (gen3, gen4, etc.)

~~~
there
[http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6...](http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_drv.c;h=0defd42705943e1776b3e9447a770048142d1a73;hb=HEAD#l85)

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mrspandex
Is this link working for other people? I just get a "No repositories found"

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eru
Works for me. But the patch is huge.

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mrothe
I like the size of this commit! Makes bisecting all so easy!

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tspiteri
The arguments against large commit size do not hold in this case. If you look
at it, the patch consists of a few changes to Makefile.am, configure.ac,
man/intel.man, src/Makefile.am, and src/intel_module.c, which contain no
significant logic, and completely new files in the directories src/sna/ and
test/. It's one new feature that is practically self-contained, so I don't see
any sense in splitting it up into smaller commits.

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mrothe
Sounds reasonable.

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nagnatron
Any way to get this in Ubuntu soon?

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nagnatron
For anyone interested add these PPAs:

<https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa>
<https://launchpad.net/~sarvatt/+archive/intel-sna>

This is not considered stable but works OK for me. Read the pages first.

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snikolic
Link broken? update: working now?

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tropin
It'd be more useful if it had a list of hardware expected to improve with this
patch.

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ComputerGuru
The link's now broken?

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chaosfox
looks like it happened just now, I refreshed the page and the patch was gone.

EDIT: and its back again. lol.

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snikolic
...and it seems to be working now...

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MostAwesomeDude
For non-X people (IOW, everybody except me and Josh):

This commit speeds up general desktop rendering, in both general and
pathological cases, for nearly all Intel graphics chipsets, causing everything
to feel snappier and more responsive. It's a universally Good Thing.

