Monday, January 26, 2015

Linux kernels for a macbook pro retina

I was unhappy about the recent Linux (3.14-3.16, and I think 3.17 too) kernels on my Macbook Pro Retina (15'), for a few reasons:

  • the nouveau graphics driver was not handling the graphics card very well (hangs when using the DRM after putting the computer to sleep once, garbage screen on various apps, slow 3D rendering), and I could never get the proprietary nvidia drivers to work (would give blank screen at boot time)
  • very unstable wireless (at least with my box home, but not with all the ones I've tried)
  • and the most painful was the need to recompile the kernel by hand, with the following modifications from stock debian kernel:
    -CONFIG_X86_SYSFB=y
    +# CONFIG_X86_SYSFB is not set
    -CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE=y
    +# CONFIG_FB_SIMPLE is not set
    
    Without these modifications, the screen would be garbled some 5-6 seconds after boot (but SSH would still work, as far as I remember).
The latest 3.18-trunk kernel fixes essentially all the above problems, which is just great. Kudos to everyone involved ! Hope it helps...

Friday, January 2, 2015

New home for Tioga

Now, it's been a long time since Rubyforge has become unusable, and the Tioga project (on which ctioga2 is based) was still hosted there. I first wanted to thanks Rubyforge for hosting our projects for so long, and then say that Tioga is now maintained in sourceforge in a git repository. The web page is hosted by sourceforge as well, and that includes the documentation. A clone of the git repository is available on github. Enjoy !