Intel GMA 500
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The Intel GMA 500 series, also known by its codename Poulsbo or Intel System Controller Hub US15W, is a family of integrated video adapters based on the PowerVR SGX 535 graphics core. It is typically found on boards for the Atom Z processor series. Features include hardware decoding capability of up to 720p/1080i video content in various state-of-the-art codecs, e.g. H.264.
As the PowerVR SGX 535 graphics core was developed by Imagination Technologies and then licensed by Intel, the standard opensource Intel drivers do not work with this hardware.
Contents
Kernel's gma500_gfx module
The Linux kernel includes the gma500_gfx
module which should work out of the box.
To check if the driver is loaded, run and verify that gma500_gfx
is listed in the output:
$ lsmod | grep gma
Advantages
- Native resolution (1366x768) with early KMS (tested on Asus Eee 1101HA)
- Up to date kernel and Xorg
- 2D acceleration
- Works out of the box
Disadvantages
- Some are unable to get native resolution (e.g 1366x768)
- No 3D acceleration possible
- Poor multimedia performance (use mplayer with x11 or sdl so fullscreen video will be quite slow)
Modesetting driver and dual monitor Setup
To setup different resolution for external monitor using xrandr, xf86-video-modesetting provided by package xorg-server from official repo is needed. After installing, an Xorg file is needed to setup the driver. Use this for device section:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-gpudriver.conf
Section "Device" Identifier "gma500_gfx" Driver "modesetting" Option "SWCursor" "ON" EndSection
Troubleshooting
Poor video performance
If you have problems playing 720p and 1080i videos, yes, that's normal while there are not accelerated XV drivers. But you can improve it up to the point of going well and smoothly for most videos (even HD ones) with these tricks:
- always use MPlayer or any variant/gui. VLC and others are usually much more slower.
- When possible, Use multithreaded decoding with mplayer (Many Atom CPUs can) & framedropping
mplayer -lavdopts threads=4 -framedrop yourvideofile.avi
- use linux-lqxAUR as it is a very good performance kernel. Edit PKGBUILD so you can do
menuconfig
and make sure you select your processor and remove generic optimizations for other processors. (About kernels)
Fix suspend
Old fbdev driver (default)
If suspend does not work, there are various quirk options you can try. First, make sure that you have pm-utils and pm-quirks installed. See the manpage for pm-suspend for a list of them all. One that has been reported to help is quirk-vbemode-restore
, which saves and restores the current VESA mode.
To test it, open a terminal and use the following command
# pm-suspend --quirk-vbemode-restore
That should suspend your system. If you are able to resume, you'll want to use this option every time you suspend.
# echo "ADD_PARAMETERS='--quirk-vbemode-restore'" > /etc/pm/config.d/gma500
If you are not able to resume and you get a black screen instead, try the above quirk command with only one dash
# pm-suspend -quirk-vbemode-restore
If this also fails, you might try removing pm-utils's video resume script, so that it's not run when you resume the machine.
# cd /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d # mv 99video ~
modesetting xorg driver
On some machines, when using modesetting driver the screen gets messed up with random data. Although the computer still works, you must go to a console and kill X or reboot "blindly". This is not optimal, so here is a solution:
First, see your available screens and modes running xrandr
:
# xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1280 x 720, maximum 2048 x 2048 LVDS-0 connected 1280x720+0+0 222mm x 125mm 1280x720 60.0*+ HDMI-0 connected 1280x720+0+0 531mm x 298mm 1920x1080 60.0 + 1680x1050 59.9 1680x945 60.0 1400x1050 74.9 59.9 1600x900 60.0 1280x1024 75.0 60.0 1440x900 75.0 59.9 1280x960 60.0 1366x768 60.0 1360x768 60.0 1280x800 74.9 59.9 1152x864 75.0 1280x768 74.9 60.0 1280x720 60.0* 1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0 1024x576 60.0 832x624 74.6 800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2 848x480 60.0 640x480 72.8 75.0 60.0 720x400 70.1
Edit or create (giving executive permissions) /etc/pm/sleep.d/99xrandr
, writing the correct names and modes for your solution:
#!/bin/sh # # turn off and on the screens so we force to clean video data case "$1" in hibernate|||suspend) xrandr --output LVDS-0 --off xrandr --output HDMI-0 --off ;; thaw|||resume) xrandr --output LVDS-0 --off xrandr --output HDMI-0 --off xrandr --output LVDS-0 --mode 1280x720 /usr/local/bin/brillo- ;; *) exit $NA ;; esac
In my case, I turn off both screens, and turn on only the main screen upon awakening. Feel free to customize to your needs. On some machines, the screen turns on by default even when the system was put to sleep with the screen turned off, so you need to turn it off twice.
Set backlight brightness
All that is needed to set the brightness is sending a number (0-100) to /sys/class/backlight/psblvds/brightness
. This obviously requires sysfs to be enabled in the kernel, as it is in the Arch Linux kernel. To set display to minimal brightness, issue this command as root:
# echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness
Or, for full luminosity:
# echo 100 > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness
A very short script is available to do this with less typing written by mulenmar.
#! /bin/sh sudo sh -c "echo $1 > /sys/class/backlight/psb-bl/brightness"
Simply save it as brightness.sh, and give it executable permissions. Then you can use it like so:
Set brightness to minimum:
./brightness.sh 0
Set brightness to half:
./brightness.sh 50
Sudo may obviously ask for your password, so you have to be in the sudoers file. A variation of this script can be found here.
Memory allocation optimization
You can often improve performance by limiting the amount of RAM used by the system so that there will be more available for the videocard. If you have 1GB RAM use mem=896mb
or if you have 2GB RAM use mem=1920mb
. Add them to your kernel parameters.
SDL fullscreen viewport is too large/small
If X segfaults before you even have a SDL app running, see FS#35187.
The Shuttle XS36VL computer has a VGA, HDMI and DVI-D port. For some reason, xrandr sees some non-existing ports:
$ xrandr -q Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 2048 x 2048 VGA-0 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 337mm x 270mm 1280x1024 60.0 + 75.0 1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0* 832x624 74.6 800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 56.2 640x480 72.8 75.0 66.7 60.0 720x400 70.1 LVDS-0 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 960x720 60.0 928x696 60.1 896x672 60.0 800x600 60.0 60.3 56.2 700x525 60.0 640x512 60.0 640x480 60.0 59.9 512x384 60.0 400x300 60.3 56.3 320x240 60.1 DVI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DisplayPort-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DVI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) DisplayPort-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
In the xrandr output, + means Preferred mode, * means the current mode. In this case, only VGA-0 is really connected physically. LVDS-0 seems rubbish as xrandr --output LVDS-0 --mode 640x480
has no effect on the physical output. However, this configuration does affect the ability of SDL (and other?) programs to display full-screen. To allow SDL programs to display with a correct viewport, one has to disable the LVDS-0 output:
$ xrandr --output LVDS-0 --off ... LVDS-0 connected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) ...
After doing so, qemu -full-screen
works for me.