Hi Sudhir > Yesterday I found that Intel is not making any motherboard that supports > Linux on Desktop.
Intel is one of the primary sponsors of Linux development. Alan Cox was employed by Intel till he resigned yesterday. Intel is also quitting the desktop board business, as announced by them earlier this week. All Intel chips have great support for Linux. They even support Coreboot development now. Some recent Intel chips, such as the Atom D2500, have had VLSI IP licensed from third parties like PowerVR, who are not OSS friendly. As a result, Intel is moving away from these vendors. In support of open source, they've stopped licensing IP from closed source driver vendors. How cool is that? > The vendor made me talk to an Intel guy on conference, who said "Intel > makes Server boards that support Linux, since Linux is largely used on > servers only". They do have many boards that supports widows. Intel has great support for Linux on their server boards/chipsets, as opposed to say Nvidia. AMD is catching up on this after they acquired ATI. > Sounds strange. Is it that m$ has bought over Intel or is it some kind of > market-manipulation tie-up going on there ? Will be good to know, if anyone > has more information. MS itself is not fairly friendly to open source. The battle against M$ was won long ago, in my opinion. I think it boils down to a business decision. Intel is already one of the top three employers of Linux engineers. Even then, they might not have enough folks to take care of driver development for all their hardware. After all, most of the big guns work on the tougher stuff like schedulers and filesystems, which are important for Intel on the server side. Driver writing is for the newbies. Intel needs great Linux support in order to defeat UNIX on the big iron side. That is a higher priority than desktop driver support, since, after all, how many people use Linux anyway? Things are very different with their mobile chips though. Over there, they are fighting ARM. ARM is very Android friendly, which in turn requires the Linux kernel. This means even Chinese chip makers are suddenly very Linux friendly, and will give you complete kernel trees for their chips. Sure, there are still some binary blobs around, but that's going away fast. In fact, Windows CE and Windows RT drivers are simply not available on a number of ARM chips now, since all they ever run is Linux (Android/Tizen/etc). Given this scenario, Intel also has to have excellent Linux support for their chips ready before the chip is out. Otherwise they can't run Android or Tizen for their demos. > In such situation, are there boards by other makers that support Linux on > Desktop or does one have the only option of shifting over to AMD ? When you ask for Linux support, what exactly are you looking for? Have you purchased a recent Desktop board from Nehru Place and tried to run Fedora 17/18 or Ubuntu 12.10 on it? Did you face any problems. See, Intel does not provide drivers for Linux on their website any more. TI doesn't. Vendors are moving away from that. Instead, they work closely with LKML, the distros, etc., to ensure the drivers are baked into the standard distros itself. That said, you need the latest Linux distro, because chipsets change fast. You might even have a situation where you buy a bleeding edge board and have to wait till the next Fedora/Ubuntu refresh to get everything working well. This is again not Intel's fault. It will work with the kernel guys and get the drivers included. But the distro might decide not to version up their kernel. So you are stuck with 3.6, say, on Fedora 17, while Intel bungs their latest and greatest drivers into 3.7. So you are forced to move to Fedora 18 to get 3.7. That's on Fedora/RedHat, not Intel. Let me know if you need more help, and I can patch you through to some vendors in NP who can provide you with "Linux compliant" boards. Cheers! Saurabh _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
