intel(4)

NAME
intel - Intel integrated graphics chipsets

SYNOPSIS
Section "Device"
  Identifier "devname"
  Driver "intel"
  ...
EndSection

DESCRIPTION
intel is an Xorg driver for Intel integrated graphics chipsets. The driver supports depths 8, 15, 16 and 24. All visual types are supported in depth 8. For the i810/i815 other depths support the TrueColor and DirectColor visuals. For the i830M and later, only the TrueColor visual is supported for depths greater than 8. The driver supports hardware accelerated 3D via the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), but only in depth 16 for the i810/i815 and depths 16 and 24 for the 830M and later.

SUPPORTED HARDWARE
intel supports the i810, i810-DC100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 852GM, 855GM, 865G, 915G, 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 965G, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 945GME, G33, Q33, Q35, G35, GM45, G45, Q45, G43, G41 chipsets, and Pineview-M in Atom N400 series, Pineview-D in Atom D400/D500 series.

CONFIGURATION DETAILS
Please refer to xorg.conf(5) for general configuration details. This section only covers configuration details specific to this driver.

The Intel 8xx and 9xx families of integrated graphics chipsets have a unified memory architecture meaning that system memory is used as video RAM. For the i810 and i815 family of chipsets, operating system support for allocating system memory is required in order to use this driver. For the 830M and later, this is required in order for the driver to use more video RAM than has been pre-allocated at boot time by the BIOS. This is usually achieved with an "agpgart" or "agp" kernel driver. Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris have such kernel drivers available.

By default, the i810/i815 will use 8 MB of system memory for graphics if AGP allocable memory is < 128 MB, 16 MB if < 192 MB or 24 MB if higher. Use the VideoRam option to change the default value.

For the 830M and later, the driver will automatically size its memory allocation according to the features it will support. Therefore, the VideoRam option, which in the past had been necessary to allow more than some small amount of memory to be allocated, is now ignored.

The following driver Options are supported

Option "ColorKey" "integer"
    This sets the default pixel value for the YUV video overlay key.

    Default: undefined.

Option "DRI" "boolean"
    Disable or enable DRI support.

    Default: DRI is enabled for configurations where it is supported.

The following driver Options are supported for the i810 and i815 chipsets:

Option "CacheLines" "integer"
    This allows the user to change the amount of graphics memory used for 2D acceleration and video when XAA acceleration is enabled. Decreasing this amount leaves more for 3D textures. Increasing it can improve 2D performance at the expense of 3D performance.

    Default: depends on the resolution, depth, and available video memory. The driver attempts to allocate space for at 3 screenfuls of pixmaps plus an HD-sized XV video. The default used for a specific configuration can be found by examining the Xorg log file.

Option "DDC" "boolean"
    Disable or enable DDC support.

    Default: enabled.

Option "Dac6Bit" "boolean"
    Enable or disable 6-bits per RGB for 8-bit modes.

    Default: 8-bits per RGB for 8-bit modes.

Option "XvMCSurfaces" "integer"
    This option enables XvMC. The integer parameter specifies the number of surfaces to use. Valid values are 6 and 7.

    Default: XvMC is disabled.

VideoRam integer
    This option specifies the amount of system memory to use for graphics, in KB.

    The default is 8192 if AGP allocable memory is < 128 MB, 16384 if < 192 MB, 24576 if higher. DRI require at least a value of 16384. Higher values may give better 3D performance, at expense of available system memory.

Option "NoAccel" "boolean"
    Disable or enable acceleration.

    Default: acceleration is enabled.

The following driver Options are supported for the 830M and later chipsets:

Option "VideoKey" "integer"
    This is the same as the "ColorKey" option described above. It is provided for compatibility with most other drivers.

Option "XvPreferOverlay" "boolean"
    Make hardware overlay be the first XV adaptor. The overlay behaves incorrectly in the presence of compositing, but some prefer it due to it syncing to vblank in the absence of compositing. While most XV-using applications have options to select which XV adaptor to use, this option can be used to place the overlay first for applications which don't have options for selecting adaptors.

    Default: Textured video adaptor is preferred.

Option "FallbackDebug" "boolean"
    Enable printing of debugging information on acceleration fallbacks to the server log.

    Default: Disabled

Option "DebugFlushBatches" "boolean"
    Flush the batch buffer after every single operation.

    Default: Disabled

Option "DebugFlushCaches" "boolean"
    Include an MI_FLUSH at the end of every batch buffer to force data to be flushed out of cache and into memory before the completion of the batch.

    Default: Disabled

Option "DebugWait" "boolean"
    Wait for the completion of every batch buffer before continuing, i.e. perform synchronous rendering.

    Default: Disabled

Option "Shadow" "boolean"
    This option controls the use of GPU acceleration and placement of auxiliary buffers in memory. Enabling the Shadow will disable all use of the GPU for RENDER acceleration and force software-fallbacks for all but updating the scan-out buffer. Hardware overlay is still supported so Xv will continue to playback videos using the GPU, but GL will be forced to use software rasterisation as well. This is a last resort measure for systems with crippling bugs, such as early 8xx chipsets. It is still hoped that we will find a workaround to enable as much hardware acceleration on those architectures as is possible, but until then, using a shadow buffer should maintain system stability.

    Default: Disabled

Option "SwapbuffersWait" "boolean"
    This option controls the behavior of glXSwapBuffers and glXCopySubBufferMESA calls by GL applications. If enabled, the calls will avoid tearing by making sure the display scanline is outside of the area to be copied before the copy occurs. If disabled, no scanline synchronization is performed, meaning tearing will likely occur. Note that when enabled, this option can adversely affect the framerate of applications that render frames at less than refresh rate.

    Default: enabled.

Option "Tiling" "boolean"
    This option controls whether memory buffers are allocated in tiled mode. In most cases (especially for complex rendering), tiling dramatically improves performance.

    Default: enabled.

Option "XvMC" "boolean"
    Enable XvMC driver. Current support MPEG2 MC on 915/945 and G33 series. User should provide absolute path to libIntelXvMC.so in XvMCConfig file.

    Default: Disabled.

OUTPUT CONFIGURATION
On 830M and better chipsets, the driver supports runtime configuration of detected outputs. You can use the xrandr tool to control outputs on the command line as follows:

    xrandr --output output --set property value

Note that you may need to quote property and value arguments that contain spaces. Each output listed below may have one or more properties associated with it (like a binary EDID block if one is found). Some outputs have unique properties which are described below. See the "MULTIHEAD CONFIGURATIONS" section below for additional information.

  VGA
VGA output port (typically exposed via an HD15 connector).

  LVDS
Low Voltage Differential Signalling output (typically a laptop LCD panel). Available properties:

BACKLIGHT - current backlight level (adjustable)

By adjusting the BACKLIGHT property, the brightness on the LVDS output can be adjusted.  In some cases, this property may be unavailable (for example if your platform uses an external microcontroller to control the backlight).

scaling mode - control LCD panel scaling mode

When the currently selected display mode differs from the native panel resolution, various scaling options are available. These include

    Center

    Simply center the image on-screen without scaling. This is the only scaling mode that guarantees a one-to-one correspondence between native and displayed pixels, but some portions of the panel may be unused (so-called "letterboxing").

    Full aspect

    Scale the image as much as possible while preserving aspect ratio. Pixels may not be displayed one-to-one (there may be some blurriness). Some portions of the panel may be unused if the aspect ratio of the selected mode does not match that of the panel.

    Full

    Scale the image to the panel size without regard to aspect ratio. This is the only mode which guarantees that every pixel of the panel will be used. But the displayed image may be distorted by stretching either horizontally or vertically, and pixels may not be displayed one-to-one (there may be some blurriness).

The precise names of these options may differ depending on the kernel video driver, (but the functionality should be similar). See the output of xrandr --prop for a list of currently available scaling modes.

  TV
Integrated TV output. Available properties include:

BOTTOM, RIGHT, TOP, LEFT - margins

Adjusting these properties allows you to control the placement of your TV output buffer on the screen. The options with the same name can also be set in xorg.conf with integer value.

BRIGHTNESS - TV brightness, range 0-255

Adjust TV brightness, default value is 128.

CONTRAST - TV contrast, range 0-255

Adjust TV contrast, default value is 1.0 in chipset specific format.

SATURATION - TV saturation, range 0-255

Adjust TV saturation, default value is 1.0 in chipset specific format.

HUE - TV hue, range 0-255

Adjust TV hue, default value is 0.

TV_FORMAT - output standard

This property allows you to control the output standard used on your TV output port.  You can select between NTSC-M, NTSC-443, NTSC-J, PAL-M, PAL-N, and PAL.

TV_Connector - connector type

This config option should be added to xorg.conf TV monitor's section, it allows you to force the TV output connector type, which bypass load detect and TV will always be taken as connected. You can select between S-Video, Composite and Component.

  TMDS-1
First DVI SDVO output

  TMDS-2
Second DVI SDVO output

  TMDS-1 , TMDS-2 , HDMI-1 , HDMI-2
DVI/HDMI outputs. Avaliable common properties include:

BROADCAST_RGB - method used to set RGB color range(full range 0-255, not full range 16-235)

Adjusting this propertie allows you to set RGB color range on each channel in order to match HDTV requirment(default 0 for full range). Setting 1 means RGB color range is 16-235, 0 means RGB color range is 0-255 on each channel.

SDVO and DVO TV outputs are not supported by the driver at this time.

See xorg.conf(5) for information on associating Monitor sections with these outputs for configuration. Associating Monitor sections with each output can be helpful if you need to ignore a specific output, for example, or statically configure an extended desktop monitor layout.

MULTIHEAD CONFIGURATIONS

The number of independent outputs is dictated by the number of CRTCs (in X parlance) a given chip supports. Most recent Intel chips have two CRTCs, meaning that two separate framebuffers can be displayed simultaneously, in an extended desktop configuration. If a chip supports more outputs than it has CRTCs (say local flat panel, VGA and TV in the case of many outputs), two of the outputs will have to be "cloned", meaning that they display the same framebuffer contents (or one displays a subset of another's framebuffer if the modes aren't equal).

You can use the "xrandr" tool, or various desktop utilities, to change your output configuration at runtime. To statically configure your outputs, you can use the "Monitor-<type>" options along with additional monitor sections in your xorg.conf to create your screen topology. The example below puts the VGA output to the right of the builtin laptop screen, both running at 1024x768.

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier "Laptop FooBar Internal Display"
  Option "Position" "0 0"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
  Identifier "Some Random CRT"
  Option "Position" "1024 0"
  Option "RightOf" "Laptop FoodBar Internal Display"
EndSection

Section "Device"
  Driver "intel"
  Option "monitor-LVDS" "Laptop FooBar Internal Display"
  Option "monitor-VGA" "Some Random CRT"
EndSection

TEXTURED VIDEO ATTRIBUTES
The driver supports the following X11 Xv attributes for Textured Video. You can use the "xvattr" tool to query/set those attributes at runtime.

  XV_SYNC_TO_VBLANK
XV_SYNC_TO_VBLANK is used to control whether textured adapter synchronizes the screen update to the vblank to eliminate tearing. It is a Boolean attribute with values of 0 (never sync) or 1 (always sync). An historic value of -1 (sync for large windows only) will now be interpreted as 1, (since the current approach for sync is not costly even with small video windows).

  XV_BRIGHTNESS

  XV_CONTRAST

REPORTING BUGS

The xf86-video-intel driver is part of the X.Org and Freedesktop.org umbrella projects. Details on bug reporting can be found at http://www.intellinuxgraphics.org/how_to_report_bug.html. Mailing lists are also commonly used to report experiences and ask questions about configuration and other topics. See lists.freedesktop.org for more information (the xorg@lists.freedesktop.org mailing list is the most appropriate place to ask X.Org and driver related questions).

SEE ALSO
Xorg(1), xorg.conf(5), Xserver(1), X(7)

AUTHORS
Authors include: Keith Whitwell, and also Jonathan Bian, Matthew J Sottek, Jeff Hartmann, Mark Vojkovich, Alan Hourihane, H. J. Lu. 830M and 845G support reworked for XFree86 4.3 by David Dawes and Keith Whitwell. 852GM, 855GM, and 865G support added by David Dawes and Keith Whitwell. 915G, 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 965G, 965Q and 946GZ support added by Alan Hourihane and Keith Whitwell. Lid status support added by Alan Hourihane. Textured video support for 915G and later chips, RandR 1.2 and hardware modesetting added by Eric Anholt and Keith Packard. EXA and Render acceleration added by Wang Zhenyu. TV out support added by Zou Nan Hai and Keith Packard. 965GM, G33, Q33, and Q35 support added by Wang Zhenyu.