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#1 2013-10-08 15:10:59

ethoms
Member
Registered: 2013-10-08
Posts: 11

Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

Dear Arch users, anybody using the dreaded poulsbo/gma500 graphics controller?

I am fully aware of the gma500 situation. Bottom line is it's a peice of crap under linux. That's why I decided to get a new netbook (Asus x201e, which I have fallen in love with).

So I decided turn my Acer Aspire One into a Jitsi appliance. I want to give it to my gran who lives several thousand miles away. I bought her an andriod tablet but she still manages to fumble and stumble, an ultimatley I can't rely on using hangouts with her. I have it all worked out; auto-login to i3 where jitsi auto-starts and auto answer video call. It's foolproof, she'd have to press Mod+shift+e to f**k it up.

Anyway, my problem is that no matter what poulsbo driver i user (psb,emgd,gma500_gfx) The best I can get is areally blue looking video (from webcam). It seems Java is accessing a hardware layer that guvcview doesn't need. guvcview looks perfect, Jitsi is blue (missing red channel i think).

So, can anyone tell me if the latest kernel etc in Arch is better for gma500 than Debian that I normally use? Is there any changes since 3.3 when it was introcued into the kernel?

BTW, I couldn't get Ubuntu Lucid to work with the original poulsbo (psb) driver. I don't care if I have to back as far as lenny, as long as Jitsi video works. Does anyone know a distro that may have included the poulsbo driver? It had good hardware acceleration support from what I've heard.

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#2 2013-10-08 15:18:18

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

I believe that there hasn't been any significant changes in the kernel for a long time. There's work currently being done in the kernel 3.13 branch, but I don't know what that all entails. The only distros that I knew of that had decent support were Fedora and Ubuntu, but that's long since been dropped since gma500_gfx was introduced.

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#3 2013-10-08 15:24:46

ethoms
Member
Registered: 2013-10-08
Posts: 11

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

Thanks for the speedy answer. I thought Arch forums was a good place to ask. smile

BTW, the current emgd driver is still supported for Fedora 14 (along with Meego and Tizen) . The main requirement being that it's targeted to xserver 1.9. It seem intel is still working on it, but won't support GNU/Linux in general. I would give it a try if I thought it worked better than emgd in squeeze (+ self compiled xserver 1.9) and ubuntu maverick (+ gma500 ppa).

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#4 2013-10-08 15:50:23

skottish
Forum Fellow
From: Here
Registered: 2006-06-16
Posts: 7,942

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

I was wrong about the kernel version; the work is going into the 3.12 branch. According to Phoronix most of it is code refactoring, but it was suggested that there may be some improvements to the driver:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n … px=MTQ0MTc

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#5 2013-10-08 16:01:31

ethoms
Member
Registered: 2013-10-08
Posts: 11

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

Thanks for the link. There's some hope yet. I thought I'd try the Fedora 14 route for now. The emgd is now version 1.18, the one I tried was 1.5.15 (I think). So there may be some improvements. I don't even know what support is missing, I suspect it's libva support. I guess I should ask the Jitsi team.

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#6 2013-10-08 16:14:00

Gusar
Member
Registered: 2009-08-25
Posts: 3,605

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

The kernel gma500_gfx driver is modesetting only. There's no memory management or other stuff in it that would allow acceleration, and there's no userspace driver. gma500_gfx is meant to be used with xf86-video-modesetting. And that's what you get - no acceleration of any kind (2d, 3d, video presentation or decoding), just modesetting.

If you want acceleration, emgd is the way to go. And here you need to find the magic combination of kernel and xorg-xserver that will work.

As for video... blue tint usually means swapped U/V planes (read up on colorspaces, in particular the YV12 colorspace, to understand what that means). Not sure if this can help you further, probably not. If you're using gma500_gfx, colorspace conversion and all the other stuff involved in video presentation is done in software anyway, the hardware isn't involved one bit.

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#7 2013-10-08 16:52:05

ethoms
Member
Registered: 2013-10-08
Posts: 11

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

@Gusar: Thanks for the info. I knew it was mostly modesetting support, but didn't realize there was nothing else going on.

The emgd in Fedora 14 looks most promosing ATM. I also suspect colour swapping. I've seen it before with mismatched VNC implementations (it was a bug where the colours where swapped). Which is why there is some hope. However, aside from that, the glitchiness went further. The video would alternately play the local (my webcam) video and the remote video, instead of both at the same time. It was just a bit buggy in general. Strange how guvcview was flawless. Infact guvcview worked OK with the gma500_gfx in kernels 3.3 and above.

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#8 2013-10-09 22:21:31

ethoms
Member
Registered: 2013-10-08
Posts: 11

Re: Poulsbo / gma500 situation in Arch

I got working on Ubuntu Maverick (10.10). Essentially it was easy on maverick because it has xorg-xserver 1.9 and kernel 2.6.35, which work well with EMGD. I used the latest IEMGD 1.18 GOLD. I followed the instructions for Meego 1.2 in the user manual/guide.

It's quite easy actually. On a fully up-todate maverick (use old-releases repo), alien the rpm's and install them. Then cd to the common/drm folder and make; sudo make install. Place the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11 (my Acer Aspire One 751 xorg.conf is below). Reboot, et voila!

BTW, I used ubuntu server and installed 'xorg' and 'i3' and 'default-jre', so it is minimal. Well, it's an appliance after all. So I haven't tested for a full desktop Maverick.


xorg.conf:

Section "Module"
	Load "dbe"
	Load "dri"
	Load "dri2"
	Load "record"
	Load "extmod"
	Load "glx"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen 0       "Screen0"		0 0 
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel_IEGD-0"
    Driver     "emgd"
#    Driver	"vesa"
    VendorName "Intel(R) DEG"
    BoardName  "Embedded Graphics"
    BusID      "0:2:0"
    VideoRam	32768
    Screen      0
    Option     "PcfVersion"				"1792"
    Option     "ConfigId"				"1"
    Option     "PortDrivers"				"lvds"
    Option     "ALL/1/name"				"lvds-display"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/PortOrder"		"40000"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/VideoRam"                 "32768"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/DisplayConfig"		"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/DisplayDetect"		"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/Accel"			"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/DRI"			"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/DRI2"			"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/XVideo"			"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/XVideoBlend"		"0"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/TearFB"			"0"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/ShadowFB"			"0"
    Option     "ALL/1/General/SWCursor"			"0"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/General/name"		"LVDS"
#    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/General/Rotation"		"0"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/General/Edid"		"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/Attr/70"			"100"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/Attr/71"                   "20300"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/Attr/72"			"1"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/FPInfo/BkltMethod"         "1"
    Option     "ALL/1/Port/4/FPInfo/BkltEnable"         "1"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier    "Screen0"
    Device        "Intel_IEGD-0"
    Monitor       "LVDS"
    SubSection "Display"
	Depth     24
	Modes    "1366x768"
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
	Identifier   "LVDS"
	ModelName    "LCD Panel 1366x768"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
        Mode         0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
	Option "composite" "enable"
EndSection

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