Poulsback needs you

Somewhere there is a netbook, a UMPC or a tablet with Intel’s GMA 500 in a drawer. If it is yours, it can help poulsback right now. Booting it once from a USB stick, with nothing to type, is enough.

Poulsback is an open graphics stack for the PowerVR SGX535 inside GMA 500 and GMA 600. We develop it on two machines: a Dell Inspiron 1210 and a Fujitsu LOOX U/C50N. The device museum lists more than forty machines built around these chips, and each of them has its own panel, firmware and wiring. Much of what a driver needs to know about a machine is written only in that machine’s firmware. To support your machine, we need to see it.

So we made a live USB stick that collects everything we need in one boot and saves it as two files you can post.

What you need

• A machine with Intel GMA 500 or GMA 600 graphics. Machines with other Atom graphics are welcome too (see below).
• A USB stick of 2 GB or more. Everything on it will be erased.
• About 300 MB of downloads and ten minutes.

You do not need to know your PCI ID in advance: the report finds it.

What the stick is

The stick runs Ubuntu 11.04 with Intel’s EMGD 1.8, the last Linux driver Intel shipped with 2D, OpenGL and video acceleration for these chips. It is a reference: it shows what the vendor’s own driver did on your machine, so ours can be measured against it.

Everything runs from the stick and from memory. The stick finds its own partitions by their IDs and never mounts the machine’s internal disk, so it cannot change what is installed there. When you are done, unplug it and your machine is exactly as before.

1. Download the image

All files are on the GitHub release page. You need only one of them:

• poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz, 268 MiB, the compressed disk image.

Do not unpack it: the writing tools below read the .xz file directly.

On Linux you can download it from a terminal instead:

cd ~/Downloads
curl -LO https://github.com/ishad0w/poulsback/releases/download/v0.0.1%2Balpha%2Bpoulsback-liveusb-natty-v2026.11.09c/poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz

2. Check the download (optional)

A damaged download is the most common cause of a stick that does not boot. This is the image’s SHA-256:

56306b5c77b20ecd70843dd44a9d7e2208de0ee5172bb7e92bab946501088eeb

Compute it on your computer and compare. On Windows, in PowerShell:

Get-FileHash "$env:USERPROFILE\Downloads\poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz"

On macOS, in Terminal:

shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz

On Linux:

sha256sum ~/Downloads/poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz

The same value is in the release’s SHA256SUMS file.

3. Write the stick

Windows: Rufus

1. Download Rufus and start it.
2. Under Device, choose your USB stick.
3. Click SELECT and open poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz.
4. Click START and confirm that the stick will be erased.

Windows, macOS or Linux: balenaEtcher

1. Download balenaEtcher and start it.
2. Click Flash from file and open poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz.
3. Click Select target, choose your USB stick, then click Flash!.

Etcher checks what it wrote before it says it is done.

After writing, Windows may say that it cannot read one of the stick’s drives and offer to format it. Click Cancel. Two of the stick’s three parts are Linux file systems that Windows cannot open; the third, POULSBACK, opens normally.

Linux: dd

Find the stick’s device name first. It is the disk with usb in the TRAN column:

lsblk -d -o NAME,SIZE,MODEL,TRAN

Then write the image. Replace sdX with that name before you press Enter: the wrong name erases the wrong disk.

xz -dc ~/Downloads/poulsback-natty-stick-2026.11.09c.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

4. Boot it and collect the report

1. Plug the stick into the machine and switch it on.
2. Open the machine’s one-time boot menu and choose the USB stick. The key is usually shown on the startup screen; F12, F11, F10 and Esc are common.
3. The stick’s menu appears for five seconds. Press the Down arrow twice to select Collect a device report and press Enter.
4. Wait one to two minutes. Nothing has to be typed.
5. When the screen says DONE, press Enter. The machine powers off (by itself after five minutes if you are away).

The stick boots in BIOS mode only. If the machine does not offer the stick, switch its firmware from UEFI-only to legacy or CSM boot first. Some BIOSes also refuse some USB sticks: if you see only a cursor and then the boot menu again, try another stick. Our Fujitsu Q550 tablet refused one brand and booted another without complaint.

If the screen stops changing for more than ten minutes, take a photo of it and power off. That photo is a useful report too.

5. Send it to us

Plug the stick into any computer. A drive named POULSBACK opens on Windows, macOS and Linux. In its reports folder you will find three files:

• pbr-…-summary.txt, a one-page summary in plain text;
• pbr-….tar.gz, an archive of about 250 KiB with the details;
• pbr-….tar.gz.sha256, the archive’s SHA-256 checksum.

Open the device reports discussion and write a new comment. A GitHub account is needed to comment.

1. The summary goes in as text, unchanged, inside a code block. Copy this frame into the comment, then replace its middle line with the whole content of pbr-…-summary.txt:

   markdown

   ```text
   paste the summary here
   ```

2. The archive goes in as an attachment. Drag the .tar.gz file into the comment box, or use the box’s attach button.

3. The checksum is optional, and it is already there. GitHub does not accept .sha256 files as attachments, but the summary’s archive: line carries the same SHA-256, so it reaches us with the summary.

Please add a sentence about what the machine is if the summary does not make it obvious, and anything odd you noticed: a black screen, a wrong resolution, a backlight that stayed off.

What the report contains

In those two minutes the stick reads:

• the system: CPU, memory, PCI and USB devices, input devices, sound codecs and the kernel log;
• the firmware: the video BIOS with its panel data, the SMBIOS tables and every ACPI table;
• the display as the BIOS left it, read from the display registers;
• on GMA 500 and E6xx machines, the same display after the vendor driver set it up, the OpenGL, OpenGL ES and video decoding features, and a short frame-rate benchmark.

A shortened summary from our Dell looks like this:

machine: Dell Inc. Inspiron 1210 A04 / board Dell Inc. 0X605H
gpu: 00:02.0 8086:8108 rev 06 subsys 1028:02b1; GMA 500 (Poulsbo); EMGD 1.8 supported
panel (VBT): type 13 1280x800 70.10 MHz 60.03 Hz 1280 1328 1360 1419 800 803 809 823 -hsync -vsync
regs (BIOS): LVDS pipe B: 640x400 (fitted text mode), LVDS on, panel power on; pipe A off
regs (EMGD): LVDS pipe B: 1280x800, LVDS on, panel power on; pipe A off
gl: EMGD on PowerVR SGX535; 2.1; direct Yes
bench: glxgears 300x300 731.534 FPS; glxgears 640x640 84.753 FPS

From lines like these we learn how each machine’s firmware describes its panel, which output the panel is wired to, what mode the vendor driver sets and how fast the vendor driver runs. That last number becomes the target our own driver must reach on the same machine.

The report never fails as a whole. If one part cannot be read, the summary says so and everything else is still saved. On our Fujitsu Q550, an Oak Trail tablet the vendor driver does not support, the report still holds the system, all 19 ACPI tables, the video BIOS and the display registers. The tablet also found a bug for us: its firmware has an ACPI table named ASF!, and the exclamation mark tripped the collector in our tests. Any name works now.

Privacy

The archive keeps the firmware tables whole, and they include the machine’s serial numbers, UUIDs and network addresses. The summary’s privacy line says whether they are in. If you would rather leave them out, boot the stick’s first menu entry instead. It logs in by itself; then run:

sudo poulsback-collect --redact

The files land in the same reports folder, with serial numbers, UUIDs and addresses replaced by REDACTED. Private keys are never collected, and nothing is sent anywhere: the files stay on the stick until you post them.

Good to know

• The other menu entries start a text console with SSH, or the same with an X11 desktop, both on the vendor driver. The release notes describe them and the settings you can put on POULSBACK.
• The first boot of those entries grows the stick’s data partition to fill the stick. On a slow stick this takes many minutes; let it finish before you power off. A report boot skips this step.
• The kitchen. The release also has the complete offline build kit, poulsback-natty-kitchen-2026.11.09c.tar.gz, if you want to change or rebuild the stick. You do not need it to make a report.

We are most interested in GMA 500 machines that we do not have yet, but a report from any Atom Z5xx, Z6xx or E6xx machine helps.

Thank you. Every report is one more machine we can get right.