12.04 64-bit and Intel HD4000

[oldfred]

My 6 year old laptop uses the i915 driver.

You may want this one? But this is quantal, should be similar for 12.04 in repository.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/quantal...api-driver-dbg

I do not know about this, but it says you need it to get it to recognize your card:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/85318...in-system-info

[williammanda]

I came across this thread since I was installing an i7 cpu on to 12.04.... I ran the :

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller [8086:0162] (rev 09)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device [1462:2111]
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915

Also I looked at the xorg log and saw where the intel driver was being used. My question is...my display driver seems to be working correctly, another user suggested that upgrading to 12.10 or another ppa. Do I to change anything? Is there a test that will verify that the intel driver is preforming correctly?

[jrog]

I came across this thread since I was installing an i7 cpu on to 12.04.... I ran the :

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Ivy Bridge Graphics Controller [8086:0162] (rev 09)
Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. Device [1462:2111]
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915

Also I looked at the xorg log and saw where the intel driver was being used. My question is...my display driver seems to be working correctly, another user suggested that upgrading to 12.10 or another ppa. Do I to change anything? Is there a test that will verify that the intel driver is preforming correctly?

I'm the one who suggested upgrading to 12.10 or using a PPA. But that's only if you want to use Intel's SNA (Sandy Bridge New Acceleration), which typically provides better graphical performance than UXA. The driver that is available by default in 12.04 doesn't support SNA, as far as I know; you need to use the PPA or upgrade to 12.10 for this support.

If you're fine with UXA, though, and not experiencing any issues, then there's no need to change anything at all.

[williammanda]

I'm the one who suggested upgrading to 12.10 or using a PPA. But that's only if you want to use Intel's SNA (Sandy Bridge New Acceleration), which typically provides better graphical performance than UXA. The driver that is available by default in 12.04 doesn't support SNA, as far as I know; you need to use the PPA or upgrade to 12.10 for this support.

If you're fine with UXA, though, and not experiencing any issues, then there's no need to change anything at all.

What is uxa? Also I would be needing ivy bridge.

[jrog]

What is uxa? Also I would be needing ivy bridge.

Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA) works with Ivy Bridge chips as well as Sandy Bridge chips.

I can't find any good, short descriptions of UXA, but here is a small bit from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UXA. Explaining what UXA is requires some technical knowledge; an extremely simplistic way of putting it is that UXA and SNA are different ways of interacting with graphics hardware with respect to memory management/usage, graphics computation, etc.

This page also contains some information about UXA vs. SNA, as well as a graph showing the benefits to performance gained with SNA: http://ickle.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/in-the-beginning/

Another performance comparison: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...SU-INTELIVYB77

You should know that SNA is more bleeding-edge than UXA at this point, though, so it may be less stable.

[williammanda]

Sandy Bridge New Acceleration (SNA) works with Ivy Bridge chips as well as Sandy Bridge chips.

I can't find any good, short descriptions of UXA, but here is a small bit from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UXA. Explaining what UXA is requires some technical knowledge; an extremely simplistic way of putting it is that UXA and SNA are different ways of interacting with graphics hardware with respect to memory management/usage, graphics computation, etc.

This page also contains some information about UXA vs. SNA, as well as a graph showing the benefits to performance gained with SNA: http://ickle.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/in-the-beginning/

Another performance comparison: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1...SU-INTELIVYB77

You should know that SNA is more bleeding-edge than UXA at this point, though, so it may be less stable.

I upgraded to 12.10. How can I tell that I am running the SNB?

[jrog]

I upgraded to 12.10. How can I tell that I am running the SNB?

SNA is already included in 12.10, but I believe that you need to explicitly enable it by creating the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf (if it doesn't exist) and adding the following to its contents:

Section "Device"
 Identifier "Card0"
 Driver "intel"
 Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
EndSection

After that, reboot. You can check to see if you're using SNA by typing the following at a terminal:

grep -i sna /var/log/Xorg.0.log

If you are not using SNA, then the above command should produce no output (so you can try it before putting the above text in xorg.conf and rebooting, just to check whether you've already got SNA enabled). If it does produce output (particularly output beginning with "SNA initialized"), then you are already using SNA.

[williammanda]

SNA wasn't enabled by default after upgrading to 12.10. I tried the statement:

grep -i sna /var/log/Xorg.0.log

with no result. After creating the xorg.conf file I get:

grep -i sna /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[ 17.520] (II) intel(0): SNA compiled: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.20.9-0ubuntu2 (Timo Aaltonen <tjaalton@ubuntu.com>)
[ 17.520] (**) intel(0): Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
[ 18.007] (II) intel(0): SNA initialized with IvyBridge backend

[jrog]

SNA wasn't enabled by default after upgrading to 12.10. I tried the statement:

grep -i sna /var/log/Xorg.0.log

with no result. After creating the xorg.conf file I get:

grep -i sna /var/log/Xorg.0.log
[ 17.520] (II) intel(0): SNA compiled: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.20.9-0ubuntu2 (Timo Aaltonen <tjaalton@ubuntu.com>)
[ 17.520] (**) intel(0): Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
[ 18.007] (II) intel(0): SNA initialized with IvyBridge backend

You've got it all set, then!

[sojusnik]

Is there another way to improve the perfomance of the HD4000 driver in Ubuntu 12.10, like installing new intel drivers or making a kernel update?