Intel Releases Ivy Bridge Programming Docs Under CC License 113
An anonymous reader writes "The Ivy Bridge graphics processor from Intel is now fully documented under the Creative Commons. Intel released four volumes of documents (2400+ pages) covering their latest graphics core as a complete programming guide with register specifications. Included with the graphics documentation is their new execution unit and video engine."
Link to documentation (Score:5, Informative)
The documentation referenced is available from Intel Linux Graphics: Documentation [intellinuxgraphics.org].
*Not* the first public release of information (Score:5, Informative)
This is a release of a large and very complete set of formal documents, but open source driver code (GPL'd and part of the mainline Linux kernel) has been released under a public development process since just after Sandy Bridge first came out in preparation for the Ivy Bridge launch. This code is written by paid Intel employees.
Incidentally, large portions of the DRM infrastructure in the kernel *and* the X server *and* the upcoming Wayland project are all being made by paid Intel employees. Note that this development work also has major benefits to the open-source AMD driver development and we would all be better off if AMD (not to mention Nvidia) adopted Intel's approach to paying people for open-source work.
In a similar manner, there is already 100% GPL'd code that is available for the next-generation Haswell graphics engines. Obviously at this stage it isn't complete, but things are not hidden behind closed doors and, just like Ivy Bridge, there should be solid launch-day support for the Haswell IGP. Considering the rumours going around about the extra resources that Haswell will offer for the GPU, this could chip could provide very solid launch-day out-of-the-box graphics support in notebooks and other devices that don't require a dicrete GPU.
Re:*Not* the first public release of information (Score:5, Informative)
P.S. --> To anyone who saw "DRM" in the previous post and had a heart attack... DRM here means Direct Rendering Manager [wikipedia.org] and is the Linux infrastructure that lets you access the GPU for graphics acceleration.
The actual documents (Score:2, Informative)
Direct link without the Phoronix fluff:
http://intellinuxgraphics.org/documentation.html
Re:Captain Obvious Here (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, to the tune of a couple 100 million: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNTE [phoronix.com]
Re:That's a lot of information (Score:4, Informative)
That's what makes the release of Intell's documentation under a CC license so logical. A group or even a confederation of groups working to develop a good driver can really make use of the docs. This can also make far more sense for Intel as they don't have build a driver for every purpose that their chips can be applied to. If anyone could afford to release documentation like this, without worrying about exposure to patents (as one other poster noted), that would be Intel. They're big enough to defend against most suits without going bankrupt.
I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of this.
Re:Good news! (Score:4, Informative)
Nvidia's "half baked" support is actually better, since their drivers are backported to older stable distros. Stuff that requires kernel or bleeding-edge X.org is a royal pain to make work on a box running an older distro.
Re:why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Intel publishes ( for free ) nearly all their architecture documents. It's been their business model since the beginning... how else would the X86 platform exist?
Someone clearly fell asleep in the 1990s, when Intel were so terrified of the V86 extensions being copied by AMD that they wouldn't tell anyone except Microsoft how they worked. People actually reverse-engineered it and released their own documentation before Intel was willing to allow things like Linux DOSEMU to use it. This did not endear me to Intel back in the day.
Indeed, an interesting relic from that era is my Turbo Assembler 5 manual. It has a number of blank entries in it for Pentium instructions, e.g.
RDTSC (Proprietary instruction. Contact Intel for more Information.") - Turbo Assembler Quick Reference, p.118