Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) graphics on Linux - why it doesn't work

[ Thanks to Adam Williamson for this link. ]

"Trying to get the thing to work on a modern distribution, the first thing you notice is that it's messy code. The kernel driver consists of a copy of about half of drm, with all sorts of stuff included and built that doesn't really need to be. And it's not remotely in sync with current drm. All it really ought to be is a few files which should have rapidly been merged into Mesa upstream. There's even a comment in the code that shows the authors are aware of this, saying that one fairly trivial change should be done before the code is contributed upstream. But the change hasn’t been done to any Tungsten-, Dell-, Intel- or Ubuntu-sourced version of the code I can find, so it’s still a mess languishing in its own repository.

"The second thing you notice is it doesn't build with any kernel post-2.6.24, due to that issue and a couple of others.

"The third thing you notice, if you're lucky, is that it's not even really the latest version of the code, and this is where things get really odd. As I mentioned, the copies of both the X driver and kernel module in moblin.org git have not been touched for eight months. However, squirrelled away in dank corners of the Ubuntu empire, you'll find rather later versions of the code."

Complete Story

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