| FOSDEM Aftermath. |
[Feb. 10th, 2012|01:56 pm] |
FOSDEM was awesome this year. We had an overbooked schedule for our DevRoom, we inaugurated the beautiful and fantastic K building, and i got to present the lima driver.
First off, i would like to thank the FOSDEM organizers and the ULB. The already unique event that is FOSDEM just keeps getting better and better. Pascal & friends: congratulations, like every year, you've outdone yourselves.
Secondly, i would like to thank all the speakers in my devroom. It is clear by now why the first-come-first-serve algorithm has to be used, and it is also clear that it is working. But thank you all for making this a successful event (even Chris, who couldn't make it due to a train derailment). I hope you guys had a lot of fun too, both during your talk and with the rest of FOSDEM.
Lastly, to all those who attended my talk (and those who couldn't get in anymore as well): Thank you all for your very positive feedback. No matter what happens with lima in future, this talk will be the most memorable moment. (oh, and a big thanks to Will Stephenson, from SuSE and KDE, for getting a webcam up that quickly). To whoever shouted something along the lines of "we don't see that, it looks like a perfect cube to us" when the caching went off in the rotating cube hack: this is the open source spirit in its most tangible form. Thank you very much.
To end this post, let me plug the lima website again. We also have a mailinglist and the #lima channel on freenode. The limare code has been available since yesterday night. Heise and lwn posted the story already, and the videos from the FOSDEM talk should soon hit phoronix as well. |
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| XDC 2012: Nuremberg! |
[Dec. 9th, 2011|05:32 am] |
Yes! The board has decided! XDC comes to Nuremberg!
For 2012 we (Egbert Eich, Professor Hopf, and I) will be hosting the annual X conference in Nuremberg!
Egbert will try to get the main SuSE conference room, or, failing that, Matthias will try to get us a university aula, so the venue itself will work itself out beautifully in one way or another. Then... Nuremberg is one of those places which is perfect for large crowds who need food and some liquids in the evening (frankonian/bavarian beergarten culture), so it is the perfect (and highly affordable) conference area from that point of view. And, the best part, even though Nuremberg is not the international hub that Frankfurt is, or the european hub that Munich is, it is halfway between the two, and travel is relatively easy from either of those points, either you take the plane, or you take a much more comfortable train from either airport, and get to Nuremberg in pretty much the same time. You can really make a big save comparing those two airports when flying inside european aerospace, and this for no time difference. One insider tip though: you get to ride the ICE at full speed (300+km/h!) when traveling from Munich (you do have to endure the rather pedestrian S-bahn for 45 minutes though).
Anyway, the main action item now is that Egbert can start to poke SuSE to see when their main conference room is available for 3 days in september 2012 (working network and enough power sockets are a given then!). I doubt that we will get an answer still in the three remaining weeks of this year.
The actual proposal e-mail sent to the board is sadly only available to X.org foundation members, but a wiki page will soon be created which recreates most of that information. But rest assured, we will get close to the wonderful experiences of XDC Toulouse (thank you Matthieu!) and XDC chicago (thank you Michael!) indeed!
(oh, and btw, we have a FOSDEM DevRoom this year, which is rapidly getting its schedule filled! If you are coming, get your talk in right now: first come, first serve!) |
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| Wheelbuilding... |
[Aug. 13th, 2011|12:46 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | bicycle | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | rumpelkammer | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Portishead - Glorybox | ] |
(Bicycle-) Wheel building is an art. An art perfectly suited for a geek; it requires technical insight, knowledge, feeling and some experience. For those interested, here are some tips and pointers from my own experience.
1) Buy "Professional guide to Wheel Building" by Roger Musson, it is going to be the best 9GBP you have spent in a long long while. [HINT1]
2) Read it, twice!
3) Buy the rims and hubs before you buy the spokes (and get the necessary tools too if you haven't already).
4) Measure the ERD (Effective Rim Diameter) using the old-spokes with glued-on nipple method that Roger describes [HINT2].
5) Buy the spokes that spocalc.xls then calculates for you.
5) Lace your wheel like Roger describes, to the letter.
6) Tension your wheel like Roger describes, to the letter [HINT3].
HINT1: Do not read any other sources, Gerd Schraner's book is just pure nostalgia and does not help you much. Especially his explanation for tensioning your spokes should be ignored: while it might get you a straight wheel, your spokes might have wildly varying tension, and are therefor likely to either break due to fatigue or have the wheel go out of true quickly.
HINT2: For creating the cut-off spokes for measuring the ERD as Musson describes; screw your nipples onto your spokes so that your spoke only _just_ comes out of the nipple into the groove for the nipple-driver. This is the measuring length you should use. If you use the absolute top of the nipple for measuring the length, then you will have no room for error, and you will very likely use up all of the thread on the spoke while bringing the wheel up to full tension (this is the experience bit right here). If it is still inside the nipple, then you most likely will end up with too short a spokes, with thread still showing, this too is a nightmare for wheel-building (your nipple-driver will not disengage). Once you bring your wheel up to its final tension, the spoke (especially double butted spokes) will come slightly further out of the nipple as with the measurement-spokes.
HINT3: For the final stage of tensioning, where the spokes tend to turn with the spoke-key, I marked the rim-sides of the spokes with different colour alcohol markers. This gave me the ability to view the turning of the spokes, and to undo it, close to the rim and nipple, without hampering the spoke-key. Since this is an alcohol based marker on stainless steel, you can rub it off afterwards, or you could just take some alcohol to wipe it off. I just kept it on now, knowing full well that most of it will disappear soon enough in the rain and mud.
I am using Extreme Airline 3s, which i got from Rose. These are rather deep rims that are very stable and sturdy, and they have a wear-indicator still. The joint is not done well, and you will always have a third or so of a mm difference in diameter there, but for trekking or mtb tires, this is no issue, it is just annoying when working on the wheels in the stand. Because these rims are so sturdy, the Schraner method becomes quite unreliable, you can much more easily get away with differently tensioned spokes, as the rim is much more likely to even differences out for you instead of showing where the differences are. You actually need to pluck the spokes instead, like Musson describes, early on in the tensioning process, to get rid of the differences in tone and therefor tension.
I ordered a pre-built set of Airline 3s (28" with LX hub and 3N72 dynamo) from Rose more than a year ago, and they seem quite sturdy and have served me well so far. But, sadly, these pre-built wheels were not up to tension, which I could hear on steep climbs as the spokes were rubbing against eachother with heavy and changing load. They were subsequently very hard to tension further, my guess is because of badly oiled nipples before assembly.
Recently I built a first set according to the Schraner method, and while this went well, and the wheels feel good, I am not sure how good they really are as I haven't used them yet. It could be that they go out of true quickly, especially after pumping quite a bit of heat in them going down some slope in the Fränkische Schweiss. The spoke lengths I used for the 28" Extreme Airline 3 rims, triple crossed (of course!) and with 12mm nipples are 276mm for the front, 281/283 for the back.
For the 26" version of the same rim, with the same hubs, same lacing, same nipples, I used 246mm for the front, and 251/253 for the back. This was calculated with spocalc after measuring the rim, according to Musson, and the ERD is 523mm (after correcting for my mistake). These wheels are for a velotraum cross crmo frame that I am just now building up, so there are no kms on them either, but I have a very very good feeling about them, as I did use Mussons book for them, and the wheels came together as good or even better than described. So while my own handiwork is still untested in real-life conditions, at least I can tell the difference between Schraner and Musson, and the spoke lengths are (now) correct too ;)
In any case, if you are into cycling, have done all other jobs around the bicycle, and mastered them, already, then try your hand at wheel-building to complete the skill-set. It is not black magic, it is actually highly logical, but you should not use sentences like "How hard can it be?" or "Right, I'll get my hammer!" when doing so. Read the right book, get the right tools and the correct spokes, and then take your time; it is really very rewarding. |
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| This way, the free software desktop is never going to make it. |
[Jan. 15th, 2011|04:52 pm] |
In order to get easier access to Nokia things, and to boost security (as in, encrypt stuff, for a change), I've been reinstalling my trusted hp 6715b. Most nokians use ubuntu, so i went for 10.4LTS. I already severely disliked the way in which you have no installation options to chose from. You get the grandmother version every time, no "i have a clue, let me decide what i want to do, myself" button anywhere.
I was lucky, in 10.4 my now 3y old graphics card was still working out of the box. But, of course, i want to have my big virtual screen back. This, of course got dropped with randr 1.2 and the Virtual keyword was reused for something else. Matthias Hopf then re-added it in 1.3; mostly to appease me, and the handful of other weirdos out there. But, try finding this option in the xorg.conf manpage. Nothing! Try googling for it, and the first 50 hits either only explain the commandline version or the old style Virtual (which got broken). Apparently, you need to add 'Option "Panning" "${H}x${V}".
Easy, pico /etc/X11/xorg.. Damn. Nothing. head /var/log/Xorg.0.log says xorg.conf.d. Type man xorg.conf.d. Damn. Nothing: "No manual entry for xorg.conf.d" Suuuper. Apparently people are supposed to _know_ that this is part of the xorg.conf manpage.
So, create a new screen, device and monitor section in 01-screen in xorg.conf.d, and press ctrl-alt-backspace, like any experienced driver developer is used to. Damn. Nothing. Head into gnome preferences stuff, enable key combination. Try again. Drop into the console. Wait for the display manager to try again. And wait. And wait. Damn. Nothing again. Ok, the DM might have died, and i don't trust this new gnome stuff, so it might be better to reboot. So Ctrl-alt-del, which worked first time round. At least something one can depend on.
Next time i look back, ubuntu is showing its plymouth style loading, but the panel is gradually turning white. Something is not driving the panel and the driver died, for whatever reason. WTF? Try some key combinations to get a console. Damn, nothing! Pinging the box still worked, but of course, no sshd was installed. Attempting a reboot didn't bring anything either, it just runs into the exact same issue. Nothing is checking whether a previous boot got one to a working console or a working X.
So, insert the ubuntu installation cd, choose live system, mount the fs, chroot to it, apt-get install ssh, and less /var/log/Xorg.0.log to reveal:
> (==) Using config directory: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d"
> Parse error on line 3 of section Monitor in file /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-screen.conf
> The Option keyword requires 1 or 2 quoted strings to follow it.
> Parse error on line 3 of section Monitor in file /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/01-screen.conf
> "2560x1920" is not a valid keyword in this section.
> (EE) Problem parsing the config file
> (EE) Error parsing the config file
>
> Fatal server error:
> no screens found
I forgot to put apostrophes around "Panning", and i got greeted with a bleeding panel, with no option to easily get around it. What on earth are we thinking here?
This is Ubuntu LTS, with radeon, KMS, plymouth and xorg.conf.d. 5 nails in the free software desktops coffin. |
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| OpenSuSE 11.1 and a recent scanner |
[Jan. 5th, 2011|03:17 pm] |
As some might know, I am switching ("intermediate") employers, and i am going to do home-office from now on. Home-office probably has tons of advantages, but one disadvantage is that you need to own your own office hardware, like a printer and a scanner. Such beasts were sitting around in Belgium, but in the 3.5 years that i have been in Nuernberg, i have either depended on the office i was respectively working for, or i ran to the copyshop around the corner. The latter is extremely unpractical and becomes rather expensive.
So, today, a Canon Canoscan LiDE 110 arrived from amazon (plus a basic samsung laser), and i have just succeeded in getting it to work with openSuSE 11.1, albeit in a very unscientific way. Here is how.
Sane is divided in front and backends. openSuSE 11.1 requires just an updated backend.
For the LiDE 110, only very recent sane (git from halfway december 2010) supports the LiDE 110 and 210, so grab the git repo.
Then, grab a recent openSuSE sane-backends package, for instance from here. Get yourself the src.rpm, and install it.
A crude way of getting something our specfile can work with is to tar -jc up the sane-backends git repo, and to move that to /usr/src/packages/SOURCES
Then edit the specfile, make sure to bump the "Version" and/or "Release" directives. Then have the "Source0" directive is pointing to the correct tarball, and make sure that the line with "%setup" is pointing to the right %{name}-... directory.
If you are as lucky as i was today, the existing patches, which are mostly about integration, will apply rather cleanly, and rpmbuild will succeed.
Install the created files (you probably won't need -devel), and you should now be able configure your scanner using yast. If yast complains about hal, then run rchal restart.
Now scanimage -L should be happy, and then you're all set.
Happy scanning! |
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| The linux desktop is dead! |
[Sep. 17th, 2010|03:41 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | drm, graphics driver, intel, kernel, libdrm, mesa, nouveau, nvidia, radeon, unichrome, x, x.org | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | France, Toulouse, XDS2010 | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
Or so it will be, soon, if these guys get their way.
Apparently, and this has been the hot new idea for the last year or two; for Xserver 1.10 people want to get rid of one of the greatest things that XFree86 brought us, and one of the better changes that happened after the X.org fork: modular graphics drivers.
While the current proposal is simply to undo the modularization work of the mid-naughties (thanks jezza!), it immediately sparked the imagination of others to go even further (to which Alanc answered rather strikingly). But merging drivers back is in itself already a very damaging move.
So what is the goal behind merging drivers?
The official reason for this is "cleaning up the API", but I fail to see any logical link between being able to clean up APIs and mashing everything together.
There is simply nothing that stops APIs from being improved when drivers are not a full and whole part of the xserver build tree.
A mashed-together tree has no more advantage than a buildsystem like our tinderbox.
And having modular drivers does not mean that one has to have a fully static API and ABI, you just need to have dependable ABI bumping, and, for the sake of overhead, sane and forward-looking API changes. Free software drivers are of course best able to keep in sync with API changes, but this is no different whether they are external or internal to the server build tree.
However, there is a difference in how one approaches API cleanups in a modular world, as one needs to think a bit more about how to do such API changes. This often leads to a cleaner design, a better structure, and it often means that people spend time trying to understand existing code, and how to best adjust it to fit the new needs, without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. By moving the drivers into the xserver tree, and outlawing the API, we will only open the door for having a libpciaccess type breakage every month.
So maybe this is the real wish behind wanting to merge back drivers: being able to pull crazy stunts with halfarsedly designed, badly structured and untested code, without implications, without accountability.
Apart from APIs degrading further, there are other more fundamental issues with this, with actually far reaching consequences.
When tying in the graphics drivers with the X server, the only way one could get driver updates, to get bugfixes, new features or new hardware support, is by installing a new Xserver.
This is probably going to be claimed as a benefit, as people want more testing of upstream code, but a slight increase in usage of upstream code, will mean a much bigger decrease in userbase on released code, and people will be even more afraid of updating anything in their system than today.
But this is how the kernel does it!
We've all heard this from our mothers: "If some other kid jumps off a cliff, is that a reason to jump off that cliff as well?"
Basically, while it might be a good idea for the often much simpler devices that have rather complete drivers (at least compared to graphics drivers :)) in the kernel to be a full and whole part of the kernel, it does not and will not work well for graphics drivers.
The complexity and the amount of movement in graphics drivers, especially with the many parts staying in userspace and the very unstable interfaces to them, makes this rather messy. And the only way that this is feasible is when those drivers are rather stable, and they definitely need to have a very stable ABI to userspace.
No-one will be able to maintain such a level of stability for graphics drivers, and i am sure that no-one will stand up to defend going that route, if this requirement is mixed into the discussion.
How to sneak in a 1 to 1 version dependency between xserver, mesa and the linux kernel... Pt. 1.
In January this year, in the run-up to xserver 1.8, there was a commit to the xserver, labelled "xserver: require libdri 7.8.0 to build", where an autoconf rule was added to depend on this version of "libdri". I believe that this was mainly because of DRI2 changes.
When I say depend here, there is not a complete dependency on a given version of libdri. One can always build the xserver without any DRI support whatsoever. But who, on the desktop, really wants that today?
So while this all-or-nothing decision is in itself questionable, there is another question to be asked here: what is this libdri?
There is a dri.pc on most systems today, and there is a libdri.so on most systems today. The former is a package config file coming from the mesa tree, the latter, is an xserver internal convenience library (hence the lack of so versioning). Smells fishy, doesn't it?
Now, while you might want to spend time looking high and low for the libdri from mesa, you will not find it. Mesa comes with 10 or more different libdris, one for each driver it supports, with the whole of the mesa linked in statically, in the form of driver_dri.so...
Urgh, how broken is that?
So, the xserver now depends on 10 or more different, driver specific, enormous binaries, all because its dri support now depends on a given version of the dri protocol. Or, re-stating that, the xserver depends on a very specific version of the monolithic, 80s style, mesa tree.
Expanding the logic for the xserver and the drivers: why not just mash the mesa and xserver trees together then? :)
More parts come into play... (or dependency Pt. 2)
The xserver depends on the standard drm infrastructure, and this is compatible up to a 4+ year old release of libdrm, namely version 2.3.0, as the basic libdrm code has barely changed since.
Mesa, however, is a different story altogether. It depends, hard, on the latest version of libdrm, and this has been so since Oktober 2008, when intel introduced libdrm_intel in libdrm 2.4.0.
In essence, this libdrm_intel is nothing more than a driver-stack internal convenience library. It only contains code that is specific for intel hardware and the only dependencies are parts of the intel driver stack (if those parts were living separately already). There are no direct dependencies from anything else.
But, ever since Oktober 2008, both the intel x driver and the intel mesa driver depend on the latest libdrm version, and since then, both radeon and nouveau joined in the frenzy.
So, while there might be some backwards compatibility between dri drivers and libdrm drivers, the reality is that intel, radeon and nouveau are today playing hopscotch. Because mesa is monolithic, and at least one of its drivers is going to depend on the latest libdrm version, the whole of monolithic mesa simply depends on the latest libdrm version.
Since mesa has been depending on the latest libdrm for a few years now, and the xserver has been depending on the latest mesa version since the start of 2010, in turn, the xserver now depends on the latest libdrm version.
Nice!
How does this tie in the kernel? (dependency Pt. 3).
Well, since libdrm has the driver specific sublibraries, those of course call drm driver specific ioctls, and of course, these ioctls change all the time. While some people claim that they try to abstract at this layer (and that this strategy is good enough for everyone...), and claim to try to keep the kernel to userspace interface stable, this of course is only true for a very limited range of kernel and userspace parts. Now, we have intel, radeon _and_ nouveau playing at this level, dividing whatever median compatibility range there is, by three.
The result is that libdrm can pretty much only be backwards compatible to the kernel by accident.
So, continuing our logic from earlier, the latest xserver depends on the latest mesa, the latest libdrm and the latest kernel.
Smashing lads! Well done! And all of this on a set of connections and foundations that make a house of cards look like a block of granite.
The root of the problem.
Graphics hardware is horribly complex. Several years ago, a single graphics card already broke the terraflop boundary, managing what a huge IBM supercomputer only managed a good decade earlier. Single graphics cards come with many hundreds of shader cores, running at frequencies above 1Ghz, have multiple gigabytes of ram, eat 200+ Watts, and can drive up to 6 displays today. There is no other single piece of hardware which is this complex.
And this complexity is of course also there in software.
You cannot count the different parts of a modern graphics driver stack on free software on one hand anymore. There is the kernel drm part, the firmware, the libdrm part, the X driver, a pair of mesa drivers, an xvmc and possibly another media acceleration driver. A graphics driver stack, can be made up of up to 8 parts today.
All of those parts are scattered over the system. There is 2 parts shipped with the kernel, 1 part shipped with libdrm, 2 drivers shipped with mesa, and the remainder can be found in an xf86-video tree.
Naturally, in order to work most optimally, these different parts have a very direct and acute dependency on each other. Bugs, new features and new hardware support usually incur changes to interfaces between those different parts all the time.
The way that those different parts are spread all over the place today make it almost impossible to have an optimal setup. Most of the time one is glad if it works at all. What's more, this spread is the core reason for the de-facto 1-1 version tie between kernel, libdrm, xserver and mesa.
The consequences of a 1-1 version tie between kernel, xserver and mesa.
With graphics hardware and graphics drivers being this complex, there is simply no way to have them in a bugfree or a constant "useful" state.
We just _have_ to live with the fact that graphics drivers will be buggy, and we should try to handle this as gracefully as possible.
This means that we should be able to replace all or parts of the graphics driver stack at any time, without negatively affecting other parts of the system.
This is what our audience, our customers as it were, expect from us.
But, by having kernel, libdrm, xserver and mesa tied together, and the different parts of the driver stack spread over them, it is impossible to exchange 1 part of the graphics driver stack, or to exchange just the graphics driver stack, without changing the whole.
By forcing our users to update all this infrastructure each, we will usually trigger a cascade of updates that reach far up the whole software stack, to the extent where trying to fix some small issue in the graphics driver, might mess up openOffice or another program that your average linux desktop user depends on.
Also, what is the chance of getting both wireless, suspend/resume and your graphics driver working to an acceptable level at the same time? This becomes very very small, and when it does work, you better not run into issues somewhere else, as an update might ruin that very precarious balance.
Killing the desktop for everyone.
No normal person can then run a free software desktop system, and expect to use it, because an arbitrary mix of hardware cannot possibly work together acceptably, at least not for a measurable amount of time.
What will be left over is preloads and embedded system.
Preloads is when some OEM, either itself, or through a linux distributor, spends many many man-years on making all parts work together properly. In the end, images will be produced which install on a very specific system and cannot be updated or maintained, except by a specialised team of people. Embedded systems basically work the same way: one combination of hardware, one image, no updates for average users except those provided by the manufacturer or their partners.
So while people might buy a free software based system in a shop around the corner, and be somewhat happy with it for a while, normal desktop users will be left out in the cold.
Looking further, by shutting out our own users, we will take away the breeding ground that free software is based on.
What solution is there?
By now, that should be pretty obvious.
Bring the different parts of the graphics driver stack together, and make its parts independent of the infrastructure they depend on.
This allows driver developers to change internal structure and API at will, while at the same time providing the infrastructure compatibility that users, hardware and distribution vendors require.
All it takes is a little care in designing infrastructure APIs, and a little care in keeping driver stacks compatible, even if that compatibility comes at the cost of disabling some features for some combinations of the infrastructure.
This is not hard to do, and it is done in multiple places.
Why the Nvidia binary driver is that popular.
In a recent phoronix survey, the amount of users using Nvidia hardware and drivers is larger than the users using any other combination.
This has a reason, and it has nothing to do with Nvidia being a completely closed source shop. Nvidia gives users the ability to install any graphics driver stack, and it should mostly be compatible with the environment it is installed in. This is simply what our users need.
What is affected by Nvidia being binary only, is that Nvidia has to put in a lot of work on making things compatible. Free software drivers have a much much easier task, or at least they would, if they, and the infrastructure they depend on, was developed in a different fashion than is the case today.
An open proof of concept.
My talk at FOSDEM, of course mentions my unichrome driver a lot, as it pretty much is my playground these days.
Even though the featurelist of this driver is very limited, it is now integrating X, DRM and DRI drivers in one massively backwards compatible build-system, with autotools detecting all the API changes across all currently used versions of the necessary infrastructure. What one can see there is that, when some care is taking in structuring the driver, it is not that hard to achieve this: it basically just takes the will to do this.
When I talked at FOSDEM, some people were stating that, while it might be possible for DRM and the Xserver, it would be totally impossible on Mesa/DRI, but for Mesa/gallium it should be easy.
In the next month or so, I took all Mesa versions that were out in the wild, and split off the main libraries from the actual DRI drivers, created a set of headers as required by the drivers, created package config files, and then move the drivers out to their own git repositories. Basically, a DRI SDK was created, and the drivers were now building and running externally to this SDK. This across 3 years of DRI development.
When I took that back to the Mesa community, what I of course got was indifference, and, suddenly, claims that while this SDK might be possible for mesa/DRI it would definitely not be possible for Mesa/gallium!
The future?
The proposed future direction for graphics drivers is to create graphics driver stacks. If not, we, the developers, might just as well stop working on free software graphics drivers altogether.
And while the current situation currently is bad, it is not impossible to fix. The problems are known and clear, a path to the solution should by now also be clear, but the willingness to put in the bit of extra thought is simply lacking.
So guys, if you really want to move into the wrong direction, please state the real reasons for doing so, state the consequences to your users; and know what the end result will be. |
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| The DRI SDK and modular DRI drivers. |
[Mar. 17th, 2010|01:31 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | amd, ati, dri, driver, intel, mesa, nvidia, radeon, unichrome, via, x | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | couch | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Kinobe - Slip into something more comfortable. | ] |
At FOSDEM I held a talk about "The free software graphics driver stack", analyzing the structure and the distribution of the different parts of the graphics driver stack, and, based on clear requirements, proposing a re-organization to be able to bring the individual parts of the graphics driver stack together. The slides for that talk are available here, and the audio and video of this talk have been made available too (Thanks Michael!).
Since I do not like to talk thin air, i also made a fully unified unichrome graphics driver stack available, proving that it is possible to unite all of Xorg, DRM and DRI drivers in one tree, and that it is possible to provide a reasonable amount of backwards compatibility (trivial for a stagnated driver) even in the Mesa/DRI driver.
My slides have a TODO section, and the most significant of those TODOs was for Mesa. This listed providing shared libraries, pkgconfig files and the necessary headerfiles for Mesa, much like the SDK that X has had ever since xfree86 4.0.0. Of course, such a thing would not happen on its own, so a bit after FOSDEM I set off and now I have implemented just that.
You can find the SDK enabled Mesa DRI tree here, and the individual drivers can also be found in my personal git repositories. A README like document is available too, to explain what one should do to build and install the SDK and to build and install the drivers.
What this gets you, once the SDK is properly installed, is the ability to build and install just the DRI driver to be able to fix bugs, get some performance gains, or just provide the driver developers with good feedback (provided that someone updated the driver tree to the latest compatible changes that is ;)). This without having to replace your libGL, which is where all the dependencies come weighing in. Anyone who has had to update this so far, knows how painful such an update is, and that it is often easier to do a major distribution upgrade.
So this brings us another step closer to make the free software desktop happen: the ability to easily update our graphics driver stack without touching anything else in our system! |
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| Coreboot and Xorg DevRooms at FOSDEM... Aftermath. |
[Feb. 16th, 2010|04:58 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | fosdem coreboot xorg | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | couch | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | accomplished | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Frank Valli & the Four Seasons - Beggin' (Pilooski Re-Edit) | ] |
FOSDEM this year was another huge success.
We had a great room this year, with luxuries as windows, which massively helped to keep the temperature under control :)
We had 100% coverage all the time, and during the first coreboot, and most of the announced Xorg talks, we had to limit the number of people getting in, as there was no standing space left (100 or so people in a 60 people devroom).
Some people complained over the size of the room for a project like X.org. But given the amount of talks that X.org people offered to give this year, we should count ourselves lucky that we had a room at all. No matter how big a project thinks it is, if no-one steps up to talk, there is nothing that can be done.
For those who got refused, don't worry. Now that Michael is back in the states, he will soon have the videos up on phoronix.
My talk about the graphics driver stack did seem to cause some crap-throwing. Seems that I touched some nerves, strange how my usually very shrewd and correct insights always cause similar reactions in the same people.
The FOSDEM event wouldn't be complete without being able to go out and enjoy some good meals with other open source people. This year was exceptionally nice, the Mirabelle had an exceptional Canard A L'Orange, and we found a really nice bar just a few streets away from the grand place, where beers are reasonable, the atmosphere is great and talking is actually possible!
I would like to thank Egbert Eich, and whoever else who helped out to make this devroom run smoothly, and thanks also go to Michael for taping the talks and all the speakers for giving them and getting a mostly pleased and happy crowd in! And thanks to those visitors, who, at FOSDEM, are always very interested and very open minded. |
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| Last Preparations for Coreboot/Xorg DevRooms at FOSDEM. |
[Feb. 4th, 2010|10:21 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | coreboot, fosdem, xorg | ] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | couch | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The noise of a crappy high speed via mini-itx fan. | ] |
In about 30h I will be on the ICE to Brussels to FOSDEM, to have 2 DevRooms there.
The Sportsbag with kit has been packed. The meeting at the customary restaurant tomorrow evening has been pretty much set up. Both my talks should be ready, and just need some studying. And I am now making the posters with the schedules and the fliers (used for possible status changes and directions) for the two devrooms so that they can be printed out later today.
The schedule for the Coreboot DevRoom (on saturday) is unchanged since my last post:
* 13:00 : Peter Stuge - coreboot introduction.
* 14:00 : Peter Stuge - coreboot and PC technical details.
* 15:00 : Rudolf Marek - ACPI and Suspend/Resume under coreboot.
* 16:00 : Rudolf Marek - coreboot board porting.
* 17:00 : Carl-Daniel Hailfinger - Flashrom.
* 18:00 : Luc Verhaegen - Flash Enable BIOS Reverse Engineering.
All seems well, and it seems that we will have everything filmed nicely too!
The schedule for the Xorg DevRoom (on sunday) has seen one last minute change with the addition of Nicolai Haehnle's talk:
* 12.00: Nicolai Hähnle : Towards GLSL in the r300 Gallium driver
* 13.00: Daniel Stone : Polishing X11 and making it shiny.
* 14.00: Luc Verhaegen : The free software desktop’s graphics driver stack.
* 15.00: Jerome Glisse : GPU Userspace - kernel interface & Radeon kernel modesetting status.
* 16.00: Mikhail Gusarov : X on e-Paper.
This addition was very last minute, and did not make the FOSDEM folder. Nicolai was quite lucky as the FOSDEM organisers had already assigned the DevRoom to the openMoko project in the morning, which luckily left a single slot free for Nicolai.
I've finished my slides for my own talk in the X.org devRoom, and it promises to be an interesting one, albeit controversial for some.
It examines some of what we can tell a few years down the road from the modular tree, and goes over the real needs. Then it explains the unification of graphics driver stacks, how to build it for the unichrome driver, and what infrastructural changes it could use.
But before i go into details i will have a small in room survey (Which will probably become a more widespread survey online). One of the questions i will ask is: "For those using, or those who have used, the nvidia or ati closed source drivers: how would you like it if nvidia or ATI told you that you needed the very latest upstream kernel, X, and mesa to be able to run the latest catalyst or nvidia driver, especially when you might need this version for its new hardware support or for bugfixes?"
(and urgh... the msi fuzzy cn700t motherboard i was using as a mailserver just died on me, even the port80 card says that no bios code is being run. Now i stuck in another cn700 board, and it has one of those really noisy fans :() |
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