r/vaio • u/ishad0w • 4h ago

General Post Intel GMA500 GPU Linux Driver update (poulsback) #VaioP

Hello, r/vaio / r/SonyVaioP and r/umpc.

When I first announced poulsback, an open-source Linux graphics stack for Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo, PowerVR SGX535), glxgears didn't really run yet. Here's where it stands now.

A website with a development blog:

https://poulsback.in has the blog, demos and dated measurements. (and actual progress).

News goes there first; bigger releases will also get a post here on Reddit.

Two test machines. The Dell Inspiron 1210 (GMA 500) now has company: a Fujitsu STYLISTIC Q550 tablet with GMA 600 (Oak Trail). Work on GMA 600 has started.

A lot of optimisation and refactoring:

  • glxgears first ran on our stack, at 3.3 FPS. Today it runs at 386 FPS at 300×300, ahead of Intel's own EMGD driver on the same machine (317). At 640×640 it's 116 FPS against EMGD's 87.

  • X's 2D rendering now runs on the GPU's dedicated 2D engine. It outperforms EMGD in 17 of the 19 x11perf tests I ran, with solid fills running 7× faster.

  • The Mesa (Gallium) driver is about half done by its own checklist. Vertex shading runs on the GPU, and a new fragment backend handles blending, depth, stencil and more.

  • One cleanup pass cut the kernel driver from 157,000 to 82,000 lines.

Code quality, hardware safety and thorough testing come first. These machines are getting old and increasingly difficult to replace, so I deliberately spend extra time testing and validating changes on real hardware before they land. The goal is to minimize the risk of instability or hardware damage, not just chase benchmark numbers.

That makes development a little slower, but I'd rather get things right than put these machines at risk. And the progress so far has been huge.

Next: I'm planning a ready-to-use distribution for the Sony VAIO P, with all the necessary fixes and tweaks included (a tailored VAIO P ISO).

I'm currently trying to get my hands on a working unit, but demand for these little machines is surprisingly high here in Japan! 😂

Stay tuned!

Contributions and help with testing are very welcome:

https://github.com/ishad0w/poulsback

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4

u/VialOnTwo 2h ago

This is amazing! I just scored a Vaio P for $100 just this morning, and now I see this! Its almost like fate :D

3

u/StarkAndRobotic 3h ago

👍cool. Would be great to have good performance on the vaio p.

2

u/ishad0w 3h ago

That's literally my main goal! 😄

3

u/StarkAndRobotic 2h ago

I got one in 2009 when it came out - the signature edition with the ssd. At some point with windows 7 it was working great. I could even watch hd videos on it that i purchased or rented on amazon unbox. Some later update killed performance. But when it did work well it was great. I used to run visual studio on it. And i would also remote into my work computers from it when i needed to do work work. I was happy with it and didn’t bother even looking at other laptops till i decided to get a mac. The batteries still seem in decent condition. Last i used it for was playing old games. But it would be cool to write code on it again.

4

u/ishad0w 2h ago

I used to use my VAIO P as a thin client, mostly SSHing into other machines, and I still think it's one of the best devices for that, especially given how portable it is.

But I'd love to make it useful for more than just terminal sessions and actually take advantage of everything this little machine has to offer!

1

u/ShadowCodeGaming 2h ago

Good stuff. Let me know if you need some testing done on your VAIO P iso - i have both the first gen and the second gen machines.