Keith Packard announced the availability of drivers for Intel's 965GM Express Chipset. Jeff Garzik responded, "great news. Here's hoping that Intel produces a standalone video card eventually, to further take away market share from closed source competitors." In Keith's announcement he explained:
"The Intel® 965GM Express Chipset represents the first mobile product that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders.
"Extending Intel's commitment to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers, support for this new chipset is provided through the X.org 2.0 Intel driver and the Mesa 6.5.3 releases. These drivers represent significant work by both Intel and the broader open source community."
From: Keith Packard [email blocked] To: linux-kernel [email blocked] Subject: Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel® 965GM Express Chipset Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 19:05:20 -0700 The Intel® 965GM Express Chipset represents the first mobile product that implements fourth generation Intel graphics architecture. Designed to support advanced rendering features in modern graphics APIs, this chipset includes support for programmable vertex, geometry, and fragment shaders. Extending Intel's commitment to work with the X.org and Mesa communities to continuously improve and enhance the drivers, support for this new chipset is provided through the X.org 2.0 Intel driver and the Mesa 6.5.3 releases. These drivers represent significant work by both Intel and the broader open source community. In addition to Intel® 965GM chipset support, the X.org 2.0 driver adds native video mode programming support for all chipsets from i830 forward. The driver supports automatic video mode detection and selection, monitor hot plug, dynamic extended and merged desktops and per-monitor screen rotation. These Intel-developed features are built in to the X.org 1.3 X server release and will eventually be supported across most of the open source X.org video drivers. Additional information available on the web: http://intellinuxgraphics.org "Intel's committment to providing high-quality drivers that meet the needs of the mobile Linux community is second to none." Matthew Garrett, Ubuntu Mobile Linux Engineer
From: Jeff Garzik [email blocked] Subject: Re: Announcing free software drivers for the new Intel® 965GM Express Chipset Date: Thu, 10 May 2007 00:28:34 -0400 Great news. Here's hoping that Intel produces a standalone video card eventually, to further take away market share from closed source competitors. Jeff, not biased at all...
2.0 Xorg driver features planned for inclusion into i810 FB drv?
Is the BIOS-less mode setting code going to be included into i810 framebuffer driver? It would be fine to have support for non-VideoBIOS video modes on framebuffer (also on LVDS ports!) and be able to use multiple monitors (internal LVDS and/or external VGA/DVI monitor) on demand to have two consoles (one on each) or switch console over between the two.
ATI drivers coming down the pipe
The threat may have been enough. AMD just announced they're going to have open source drivers for ATI cards. No annoucement on timing, but here's hoping it's sooner than later.
Source of your statement
Source of your statement (yes I'm sceptical).
Source: AMD will deliver open graphics drivers
Source: AMD will deliver open graphics drivers (<-- link)
Don't hold your breath
ATI promised nothing, they just had a marketing flack onstage at the Red Hat Summit who said they were "committed" to fixing their problems with Open Source. Which means nothing.
ATI made a press release back in 1999 saying they were "committed" to supporting Linux, and seven-plus years later, we have partial specs for three-generations-old hardware and binary drivers with 60% of the performance of their Windows counterparts.
If at this point, you believe anything ATI says about their Linux support, you should probably be "committed", yourself.
AMD ownership might help?
When I heard that AMD had bought ATI I had a glimmer of hope that ATI might become more FLOSS-friendly, but I've yet to see anything like that happening. Hopefully Intel's actions will provide more impetus, but like you say I'm not holding my breath.