Many linux users who bought early netbooks with Intel GMA Poulsbo GPUs
ended up kicking themselves in the rear. If you got rid of yours, you
may end up kicking yourself in the rear even more. According to
http://blog.bodhizazen.net/linux/linux-gma500-poulsbo-driver-moved-out-of-staging/
==================================================================
Good news for people with an Intel GMA500 (Poulsbo) graphics card,
support is now in the mainline Linux kernel.
In the Linux 3.3-rc1 (mainline) kernel the driver has moved out of
staging and re-named.
It is now located under
Device Drivers ->
Graphics support ->
DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) ->
Intel GMA5/600 KMS Framebuffer
and is now called "gma500_gfx".
Once the kernel team with your distribution of choice makes the
adjustment, the GMA500 should work "out of the box" on any Linux
Distribution using kernel 3.3 or higher.
==================================================================
Since the latest stable gentoo-sources is 3.2.21, I keyworded 3.3.8
and ran "emerge --sync" on my brick^H^H^H^H old netbook and built the
kernel with the options indicated above.
***IMPORTANT*** I had to emerge x11-drivers/xf86-video-fbdev as the
X11 video driver. I believe that x11-drivers/xf86-video-psb is the old
deprecated Poulsbo driver... and I never could get the bleeping thing to
build anyways.
Initial quick review...
1) It woiks!!! The netbook is now displaying 1366x768.
2) No xorg.conf required. And udev is not sniffing anything out,
because the machine is running on mdev.
3) Performance is decent for an early Atom. I used Youtube for
quick-n-dirty torture testing...
- 480p Youtube videos are OK, even at fullscreen
- 720p Youtube videos are OK on the standard player and large player,
but stutter slightly at fullscreen
- 1080p - fuggedaboutit
4) Getting brightness control, etc, to work is still hit-and-miss.
5) Hibernate (suspend-to-disk) does not work. Reading comments at the
blog, that appears to be a known problem with the GPU and the kernel
driver.
--
Walter Dnes <waltd...@waltdnes.org>
