Intel GMA 500 dkms-psb fails to build

[Icaho]

Hi All,

I have seen a bug report already for this so haven't created one.

I'm trying to get Mageia 1 to install on my netbook (AO751h) which has the notorious poulsbo graphics card

I have been trying to build the dkms-psb module for the last couple of days but have definitely hit a brick wall, has anyone managed to build this yet or have any idea on a possible solution?

Other than that it is working perfectly

[drakeia]

I plan to use Mageia on my FitPC2i, so I also need the poulsbo driver to work...

I know that Blino left Mandriva to fork with Mageia, he has been working on this driver.
See here.

Does anyone have any feedback about this support ?

[doktor5000]

Well he has worked on it, please look at the date of his blogpost which you linked
Looking at the SPEC for this package it seems the last kernel which this compiles against
is 2.6.32. I'll have a look at it.

[CommonTern]

Have an insprion with poulsbo SCH (a.k.a. gma500) I downloaded the mageia iso and booted from a USB, then installed to HDD.
Everything was fine until I wanted to switch from 800x600 to higher res. Some pkgs were installed and I tried to change res again.
I got an error about an ABI mistmatch. version 8 vs. version 10 Searching around, some suggested remove the xorg psb driver.
I removed that but now when I try to change res the xorg psb wants to be installed again.

Does this dkms-psb pkg fix this problem? Is it recommended to find a different distro or will poulsbo (gma500) be supported in Mageia?
I see that there is a gma500 driver in the linux/driver/staging directory is Mageia hard-coupled to the kernel version?
Is it possible to build a 3.0.x kernel for my current install? Or is the kms pkg needed for Xorg to work and a new kernel doesn't
solve the problem on its own?

[doktor5000]

From what i know so far, the dkms-psb driver can only be compiled against kernels up to 2.6.35.
There are at least three other drivers for Poulsbo chips: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport ... rdsPoulsbo
EMGD and IEGD can be downloaded directly from Intel, but are really difficult to install.
The newer in-kernel driver (psb-gfx) is under heavy development, and only useable with a really recent kernel.

So seems like if you want to try it, you need to compile a newer kernel with that driver for yourself.

[CommonTern]

Thanks doktor5000. Do you know how tightly coupled Mageia is to the kernel? Some distros make it very difficult to run with a different kernel.
I'm new to Mageia. I guess I will give it a try. Although kernel.org is down right now. Any tips or suggestions are welcome.

[drakeia]

Maybe Blino could come over here and tell us if he plans to do something about this driver he once worked out.
Is someone in touch with him ?

[CommonTern]

Don't know anything about Blino, sorry.
Meanwhile I have built 3.0.4 a few times but the boot process stops after the penguin graphic is displayed.
Unfortunately there's no screen output and the system has to be hard rebooted so no error logs either.
I am trying the driver that's in drivers/staging/gma500. It won't get me much even if I do get it working as it
seems to be limited to 800x600 too. Maybe it won't work at all. I don't understand the glue between this driver
and X. Does anyone know how X uses a kernel mode graphics driver? Do I also need to modify X?

Not sure if feathers are sought after here but it seems that any distro that gets this non-proprietary kernel driver
to work gets a big feather in their cap.

To OP, I feel I may have hijacked your thread and I will start a new thread if you'd like to report any results I get with
building this kernel.

[doktor5000]

Does anyone know how X uses a kernel mode graphics driver? Do I also need to modify X?

Not sure if feathers are sought after here but it seems that any distro that gets this non-proprietary kernel driver
to work gets a big feather in their cap.

Well, also blino can't do magic about this one, except rewrite a part of the dksm-psb driver.

@CommonTerm: You don't need to modify X, but it could be that other parts need updating,
like libdrm or mesa or maybe anything else, too.

As you can see from the Ubuntu wiki page i linked, they have at least two of those
drivers working, but one is under heavy development, this is the one you're trying (psb-gfx)
and the others are also intel proprietary drivers (EMGD, IEGD) which are difficult to set up.