As a part of the continuing saga with my netbook (gma500) I took the Fedora 17 Alpha release for a test drive with gnome shell. I was quite pleased with the result.
The good – The intel gma500 (poulsbo) graphics card, my wireless card, and most interestingly gnome-shell were all working out of the box. Wow, gnome is looking great !!!
The bad – Performance was a little slow (running from a flash drive), there was some occasional blanking out of the screen, and the netbook seemed to be running a bit hot.
Screen shots (click thumbnails for larger image):
Performance could come from the fact that kernels for development releases are built with a lot of debug instructions.
The Fedora kernel team regularly build a kernel without debugging options, pushes it to the repos, then reenable the debugging options for the testers.
But if the performance hit is too much for your machine, you could try sticking to one of those “non-debug” builds.
Try installing this kernel, it seems to have been the latest build without the debugging options:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=300503
Is the performance improving? :)
@bochecha- Thank you for the tip, I will let you know how the performance looks after I install it (just running live for the moment as Fedora 17 is still in alpha).
More likely the slow performance is because you don’t have hardware accelerated 3D; it’s using the llvmpipe software rasteriser.
gnome-shell on the gma500?
is it llvmpipe software rendering?
I tried the f17 livecd on the gma500 and I can confirm that gnome-shell is running with llvmpipe.. just a problem.. my screen is splitted horizontally, it should be due to plymouth because the same it happens on ubuntu and I have to disable plymouth at all.
So i’m wondering how did you disabled plymouth on the fedora livecd?
Btw gnome-shell with llvmpipe is working great and fast inside virtualbox.. how can we replicate and use llvmpipe in ubuntu? any hints?
I expected that the gma500 would benefit from having the psb_gfx framebuffer device enabled from the kernel. Can someone confirm that it is enabled on kernel later than 3.3.0-rc3git7 ?
I expected it was saved from staging, which would allow to kick it out from the RPM Fusion kmod-staging package.
@kwizart On Fedora 17 there is a driver, gma500_gfx , and it is no longer in staging. In addition , the psb_gfx driver is built by default. So my guess would be “kick it out from the RPM Fusion kmod-staging package” as you say.
See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=785053
What additional information do you need ? You can also ask on IRC, #fedora-kernel
Thx for the info, but some others options are still not enabled
CONFIG_DRM_GMA600=y and CONFIG_DRM_GMA3600=y
I’ve tried to enable both and the result is not good. This was for a cedar trail platform, but I will try to reproduce with an oaktrail platform.
The first error is about GTT/GATT PCI BAR not initialized.
@kwizart – Good luck. I do not have the hardware to test those kernel modules. They are fairly new in the kernel config, hopefully they will improve rapidly. You might have better luck filing a bug report with kernel.org.
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I’ve been waiting for this since April 2011 when I found that I couldn’t update my Ubuntu distro any further without breaking GMA500. I’ll be doing a little dance when I can get my preferred distro (Fedora) running on the netbook without hacking up the graphics drivers.
The graphics performance is OK, but suspend and often hibernation is not working with the gma500_gfx driver for me on Vaio P. I tried most of the pm-suspend quirks but no go – it locks on suspend. Without gma500_gfx I can suspend, but on resume it is either locked or screen remains blank, while system is OK (I can reboot).
I’ve installed Fedora 17 beta on my netbook. It looks pretty good, but with all the debugging information in the kernel and the other modules, I find it somewhat sluggish.
There is a good Fedora 16 that has all the bells and whistles installed it is available from https://kororaa.org/ Go to the Download page.
any solution for the half screen problem?
@dimos – what kernel ?
i had this problem with a beta version.
installed f17 today and it’s working well on acer aspire one