mattst88's blog
Since the early 2000s, the potential for upgrading the CPU in the Silicon Graphics O2 with a 900 MHz RM7900 has been blocked by the inability to modify the PROM firmware. To that end, I built ip32prom-decompiler , a program that decompiles the PROM into sources that can be reassembled into a bit-identical image. The decompiler goes to great lengths to produce assembly that is understandable and…
GNOME 40 was released at the end of March, and yesterday I added the last bits of it to Gentoo. You may not think that's fast, and you'd be right, but it's a lot faster than any GNOME release has been added to Gentoo that I can recall. I wasn't looking to become Gentoo's GNOME maintainer when I joined the team 18 months ago. I only wanted to use a GNOME release that was a little less stale. So how…
On Intel's Gen graphics, three source instructions like MAD and LRP cannot have constants as arguments. When support for MAD instructions was introduced with Sandybridge, we assumed the choice between a MOV+MAD and a MUL+ADD sequence was inconsequential, so we chose to perform the multiply and add operations separately. Revisiting that assumption has uncovered some interesting things about the…
In November I was lamenting the lack of selection in credible Haswell-powered laptops for Mesa development. I chose the 15" MacBook Pro, while coworkers picked the 13" MBP and the System76 Galago Pro. After using the three laptops for a few months, I review our choices and whether they panned out like we expected. CPU RAM Graphics Screen Storage Battery 13" MacBook Pro 2.8 GHz 4558U 16 GiB GT3 -…
When I started at working at Intel last year on the open source 3D driver I was given a spare Lenovo T420s (Sandybridge) as my development machine. Almost everyone on my team had upgraded to Ivy Bridge by February, but I planned just to hold out a few months until Haswell was released. I then spent all summer wondering where the Haswell laptops were, and only now, five months later has Lenovo…