RE: centrino

RE: centrino

[Grover, Andrew]

> From: Jeffrey Baker [mailto:jwbaker@acm.org] 

> Here was my collected experience on a Centrino machine,
> before I returned it in favor of an iBook:

> [snipped description of how PM, cpu perf states, and wlan don't work
on Linux]

It's kind of sad, but I don't think that this means that Centrino has
somehow worsened the Linux laptop experience -- it's just one example of
how *all* laptops aren't optimal under Linux.

OEMs tried selling Linux laptop SKUs a few years ago and they didn't
sell. If the Linux community wants good laptop support, it cannot rely
on anyone but itself to make that happen. Just like Linux on servers in
the old days. :) I can see this happening on acpi-devel and cpufreq
mailing lists, but obviously, as your experience proved, there's still
work to do.

Regards -- Andy

Re: centrino

[Jeffrey Baker]

Here was my collected experience on a Centrino machine,
before I returned it in favor of an iBook:

The AGP worked in 2.4.21-pre but not in 2.5.68-mm2,
regardless of agp_try_unsupported=1.  The Radeon 9000
Mobility in the Acer Travelmate is supported in XFree86
4.3.0.  Don't know about the IBM.

The IDE DMA seemed to work fine in both 2.4.21 and 2.5.68.

Power management didn't work at all because ACPI is a sick
joke.  In 2.4 ACPI does nothing, and in 2.5.68 it can put
the machine to sleep, but not wake it up.  APM could almost
wake the system from sleep, but then it crashed immediately.
ACPI incorrectly reports the state of the system fans, the
battery, the battery charger, and the temperature sensor.
In other words, no part of it functions correctly .  This is
either a problem with Centrino chipset in general or Acer
BIOS programming in particular.

CPU frequency scaling didn't work in either kernel but there
seem to be rumbles of reverse engineering going on with
that.

The wireless doesn't work in any kernel, and Intel have
stated specifically on their web site that they have no
plans for any future Linux driver for that device.

The Centrino package is altogether hostile to Linux.

-jwb

Re: centrino

[Alan Cox]

> Power management didn't work at all because ACPI is a sick
> joke.  In 2.4 ACPI does nothing, and in 2.5.68 it can put
> the machine to sleep, but not wake it up.  APM could almost
> wake the system from sleep, but then it crashed immediately.
> ACPI incorrectly reports the state of the system fans, the
> battery, the battery charger, and the temperature sensor.
> In other words, no part of it functions correctly .  This is
> either a problem with Centrino chipset in general or Acer
> BIOS programming in particular.

For some people centrino seems to work a little better so it may
be BIOS bugs too. The usual "buy something 6 months old" rule applies
to BIOS code as well as anything else

> CPU frequency scaling didn't work in either kernel but there
> seem to be rumbles of reverse engineering going on with
> that.

Intel are still being a pain about this. Quite why they think its
a secret is beyond me. Fortunately every other CPU vendor is being a 
lot more positive.

> The wireless doesn't work in any kernel, and Intel have
> stated specifically on their web site that they have no
> plans for any future Linux driver for that device.

There are awkward issues there certainly.

> The Centrino package is altogether hostile to Linux.

Time may change that. The ATI/ALi chipset AMD laptops like the Compaq
z9xx were really Linux hostile. Now with the right stuff in place and
some things fixed (some working around their bugs, some fixing ours)
they work really well.

Centrino ultimately is a help - the laptop chipset space is
consolidating and there are less and less variations appearing. That
helps us because there is less to support. Its the same as with X and
IDE and other things nowdays - we get a lot less deeply weird hardware
to fight.

Re: centrino

[Anders Karlsson]

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On Sat, 2003-05-03 at 16:21, Alan Cox wrote:

> > The wireless doesn't work in any kernel, and Intel have
> > stated specifically on their web site that they have no
> > plans for any future Linux driver for that device.
> 
> There are awkward issues there certainly.

Alan, have you had any better luck talking to Intel than I had? At least
you are a well known person in the Linux environment and have a lot more
clout than when a complete nobody like me tries to get their attention.
Getting the wireless working would be a great step forward.

> > The Centrino package is altogether hostile to Linux.
> 
> Time may change that. The ATI/ALi chipset AMD laptops like the Compaq
> z9xx were really Linux hostile. Now with the right stuff in place and
> some things fixed (some working around their bugs, some fixing ours)
> they work really well.
> 
> Centrino ultimately is a help - the laptop chipset space is
> consolidating and there are less and less variations appearing. That
> helps us because there is less to support. Its the same as with X and
> IDE and other things nowdays - we get a lot less deeply weird hardware
> to fight.

Eventually things will work in favour of linux. It usually does. The
time it might take to get there is a variable factor though. Personally
I thought Centrino was a good idea. I normally don't like 'Chipzilla'
but in this instance I think they did a good thing.

Regards,

/Anders

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Centrino

[Anders Karlsson]

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Hi folks,

I've been trying to install linux on an IBM X31 Centrino laptop the last
few days. There are a few things that doesn't work so well. Like agp
driver (radeon.o) and the IDE subsystem. I've been trying to install it
with SuSE Pro 8.2 which is using a 2.4.20 kernel. The question I'd like
to ask is what the Centrino support is like in kernel 2.4.x and 2.5.x
and what the outlook would be on this should the support be a bit
lacking.

I have the laptop at home, and I would be willing to try things out to
get them working, so if there were patches to try out (preferably
against a 2.4.20 kernel) I'd be happy to do that.

Not entirely sure what data you'd guys would like, but I will follow up
with a lspci listing shortly.

Regards,

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Re: Centrino

[Martin List-Petersen]

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On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 06:53, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I've been trying to install linux on an IBM X31 Centrino laptop the last
> few days. There are a few things that doesn't work so well. Like agp
> driver (radeon.o) and the IDE subsystem. I've been trying to install it
> with SuSE Pro 8.2 which is using a 2.4.20 kernel. The question I'd like
> to ask is what the Centrino support is like in kernel 2.4.x and 2.5.x
> and what the outlook would be on this should the support be a bit
> lacking.
>
> I have the laptop at home, and I would be willing to try things out to
> get them working, so if there were patches to try out (preferably
> against a 2.4.20 kernel) I'd be happy to do that.

I've got the Dell Latitude D600 (Centrino, ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 32
MB)

The Wlan card is unsupported yet (if you've got that). The AGP drivers
of the Kernel work fine (radeon driver loads without complaining) on
2.4.21-rc1. X needs a tweak, since the Radeon 9000 first will be
supported in 4.3.0. I've started documenting my setup at
http://www.marlow.dk/dell_d600

A lot of the PCI devices are still unknown though (Host Bridge, PCI
Bridge, ISA Bridge, IDE, CardBus Bridge) on lspci

Regards,
Martin List-Petersen
martin at list-petersen dot dk
--
Randal said it would be tough to do in sed.  He didn't say he didn't
understand sed.  Randal understands sed quite well.  Which is why he
uses Perl.   :-)  -- Larry Wall in <7874@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>


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Re: Centrino

[Anders Karlsson]

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On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 08:30, Martin List-Petersen wrote:

> I've got the Dell Latitude D600 (Centrino, ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 32
> MB)

The X31 has an ATI Mobility Radeon as well, but I don't think it is a
9000. I will double check that when I get home tonight though.

> The Wlan card is unsupported yet (if you've got that). The AGP drivers
> of the Kernel work fine (radeon driver loads without complaining) on
> 2.4.21-rc1. X needs a tweak, since the Radeon 9000 first will be
> supported in 4.3.0. I've started documenting my setup at
> http://www.marlow.dk/dell_d600

I do have the Wlan card and I e-mailed Scott McLaughlin about it. His
response at the time was that Intel was still pondering what they would
do about the drivers. I assume that a gentle stream of plesant e-mails
to the appropriate place at Intel asking nicely for the drivers could
result in the drivers coming available.

The SuSE 2.4.20 kernel does not appear to get along with the X31's
graphics card. I will grab the latest 2.4.21-* kernel and give that a
try. Oh, and the GATOS drm drivers had a decidedly negative impact when
I tried them. I stopped X, removed radeon.o, copied the new radeon.o in
place, started X and experienced a hard hang. Interesting side-effect.

I have bookmarked that page, and I will look in on it now and then. I
should perhaps perform similar documentation for the X31 in case others
try to get Linux working on one.

> A lot of the PCI devices are still unknown though (Host Bridge, PCI
> Bridge, ISA Bridge, IDE, CardBus Bridge) on lspci

Have you seen things like 'hdparm -d1 -X69' failing and telling you that
the actions fail and/or are not allowed? Would you agree that this could
be a side-effect of things you listed not being known to the kernel?

Regards,

/Anders

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Re: Centrino

[Anders Karlsson]

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On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 09:57, Balram Adlakha wrote:
[snip]
> 
> You mean the video card doesn't work properly? What happens when you run X etc?
> Are you have trouble booting your centrino notebook or something?
> The video card has got nothing to do with the cpu. Your centrino 
> notebook should work normally. If you want to save power then you can 
> select the power saving options in the config.

Well, the vided card does work, but seemingly not after you restart your
X server. You get presented with a black screen after restarting X, and
you can kill the X server from there, so it runs, just doesn't show
anything.

The thinkpad boots, that is no problem. The powersaving has been brought
to my attention as a possible source of problem. I already run it w/o
ACPI, and will try disabling APM as well..

The other thing that has been highlighted to me is that there might be a
problem with idle in the 2.4.20 kernel. I will be trying 2.4.21-rc1 over
the weekend if that works better.

Regards,

-- 
Anders Karlsson <anders@trudheim.com>
Trudheim Technology Limited

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Re: Centrino

[Balram Adlakha]

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On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 04:31:21PM +0100, Anders Karlsson wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 09:57, Balram Adlakha wrote:
> [snip]
> > 
> > You mean the video card doesn't work properly? What happens when you run X etc?
> > Are you have trouble booting your centrino notebook or something?
> > The video card has got nothing to do with the cpu. Your centrino 
> > notebook should work normally. If you want to save power then you can 
> > select the power saving options in the config.
> 
> Well, the vided card does work, but seemingly not after you restart your
> X server. You get presented with a black screen after restarting X, and
> you can kill the X server from there, so it runs, just doesn't show
> anything.
> 
> The thinkpad boots, that is no problem. The powersaving has been brought
> to my attention as a possible source of problem. I already run it w/o
> ACPI, and will try disabling APM as well..
> 
> The other thing that has been highlighted to me is that there might be a
> problem with idle in the 2.4.20 kernel. I will be trying 2.4.21-rc1 over
> the weekend if that works better.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -- 
> Anders Karlsson <anders@trudheim.com>
> Trudheim Technology Limited

I think support for your video card was added in xfree 4.3. What 
version are you running now?

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Re: Centrino

[Anders Karlsson]

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On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 16:46, Balram Adlakha wrote:
[snip]
> I think support for your video card was added in xfree 4.3. What 
> version are you running now?

I am running 4.3.0 (part of SuSE Pro 8.2) and I have also grabbed the
GATOS drivers to get a better driver. The interesting thing about that
was that the GATOS project provide drm code to build new kernel drm
drivers, and when installing the radeon.o from that build, when I
started X I had a hard hang. Could do nothing but hold down the
powerbutton until the thing switched off, about 8-10 seconds..

Regards,

/Anders


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Re: Centrino

[dean gaudet]

On Thu, 2 May 2003, Anders Karlsson wrote:

> driver (radeon.o) and the IDE subsystem. I've been trying to install it

the IDE subsystem is trivial to support.  it's in -ac patches from some
point i forget, and also here
<http://arctic.org/~dean/patches/linux-2.4.21-pre5-ac2-centrino.patch>

-dean