Hi folks,
So, Kernel 3.4 got released a couple of days ago, and the merge window has reopened for the 3.5 Kernel release.
We have put lots (and I mean it!) of work towards making a huge progress in the Intel Linux Graphics kernel driver for the 3.4 kernel, but things look yet even more brighter for the next one – namely, 3.5!
As a picture speaks louder than 1000 words, I’ve done a simple chart comparing the number of changes in the drivers/gpu/drm/i915 directory over the Linux Kernel releases since the 2.6.30 release some years ago:
Linux Kernel commits rate between 2.6.31 up to 3.5.0 (so far)
Between 3.3 and 3.4 Kernel versions, we had an astonishing number of 152 commits related to the drivers/gpu/drm/i915 directory (e.g., the Intel graphics driver in the kernel). This number looks impressive – but it is pale if we compare it to the 343 commits we had so far for the 3.5 Linux kernel merge window
So far, we are just 2 patches away from the all-time high of the 2.6.37 Kernel – and we are just getting into the 3.5 Kernel development cycle yet.
In case it is easier to read the absolute numbers instead of graphs, here is the full picture, generated from the git log --oneline <<kerner_version>>^1..<kernel_version>> drivers/gpu/drm/i915 command, for all the kernels between 2.6.29 and 3.5 (up to date):
2.6.30 98
2.6.31 122
2.6.32 119
2.6.33 144
2.6.34 69
2.6.35 155
2.6.36 184
2.6.37 345
2.6.38 247
2.6.39 113
3.0.0 109
3.1.0 131
3.2.0 126
3.3.0 78
3.4.0 152
3.5.0(next) 343
I’ll try to cover some of the highlights of the next Kernel release in the next post (ppgtt? haswell? valley view? DRI1 ? RC6? I2C? VBT? Those are just some of the keywords) – but this kinda answers the question whether the Intel Linux Graphics driver is alive.
Yes, it is.
And it rocks 
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Cool. But how about speedup 3D part of the driver? Comparison of native D3D games and opengl in linux shows that linux is much slower…
Phoronix testing is quite misleading in this case. For example, Unity compositor (or desktop effects) in the Ubuntu version he was using are responsible for up to 20% performance drops in some cases, like Michael has just published at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_ivy_desktops&num=1.
So it is not very fair to compare windows variants of the games, which are optimized for speed and do not suffer side-effects from the compositors, to running same games on Ubuntu, where the drivers, besides running the game, are also responsible for rendering the nice Unity effects all the time, even if those are not used.
But still, yes, there is lots of performance work going into 3.5 kernel. In some games, I found up to 2x performance improvements when comparing to older ones. But we’ll see how it will go in the future
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Recently released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS complete freezes with Ivy Bridge GPU. Only solution is upgrading kernel from 3.2 to 3.3/3.4. Are any bugfixes planned for linux 3.2?
Bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/999910
I don’t know what Ubuntu plans for 3.2 kernel are, but all the fixes were backported to it up to the 3.2.17 release – so if you are still experiencing hangs even with 3.2.17, something got missing indeed.
I haven’t seen any hangs with it though, but I don’t have retail Ivy Bridge GPUs, only the pre-production ones. But I’ll try to figure out could have affected it.