[Bug 941172] Re: do-release-update to Precise produces a hardware-not-support-in-Natty warning

[Bryce Harrington]

The error message sounds adequate to me, but I sympathize about warnings
and errors that just leave you with more questions than answers.  I'm
not sure what exactly to say though.

But here's a brain dump of what I know.  This is going to be way too
blathery for just dropping into that error message, but maybe someone
can massage a usable text out of it.


[Historical Background]

There are basically three families of chips in 8xx:  i810 (810, 815),
i830 (830, 845), and i855 (855, 865).  These chips were manufactured
early on in Intel's integrated graphics history.  They were used in a
wide variety of different laptops and motherboards by a wide number of
vendors, and the way the chips were wired / integrated into the vendor's
board could vary quite a bit.  This also preceded Intel's open source
graphics lab, so I believe the funding from Intel for 8xx support work
is very low priority.  I've also heard the documentation is rather
sketchy, even internally to Intel.

All these factoids together have had the result that upstream 8xx
support upstream has been more art than science.  Bugs have tended to be
very hardware-specific, and often fixing a lockup bug on one person's
laptop will cause a regression on someone else's with exactly the same
8xx chip in some other laptop.  Compounding the trouble is that few
upstream developers have access to a wide enough variety of 8xx boxes to
ensure their code changes have been sufficiently tested.

On top of all this, by now the 8xx hardware line is quite old.  It's
likely many systems suffer from hardware problems - power supply
irregularities, loose/corroded soldering, loose wiring, etc. - which
often have very similar symptoms to graphics issues.  This can make
debugging a given issue quite Fun.

Yet despite all these troubles, upstream *does* still take 8xx bug
reports, and they do try to fix them as they have time.  The current
-intel driver *should* still operate on the i830 and i855 families (i810
is considered a lost cause now.)

Even so, here at the distro level we *don't* take 8xx bug reports for
any 8xx chips, but instead direct people to discuss problems directly
with upstream.  All the problems that make supporting 8xx difficult for
upstream affect us as well.  Indeed, in the past we used to pull fixes
from upstream, but they invariably broke other people's systems.  We
found we were expending a lot of developer and bug triager time chasing
bugs, with little gain except just to annoy 8xx users who didn't know if
their systems would work one week to the next.  :-)

So, now we ship just what upstream provides.  If it works and lets you
run Ubuntu on your 8xx, that's great.  If not, please go to
bugs.freedesktop.org to provide upstream with feedback.


[Current Status]

In Precise, if you've had Ubuntu installed on your hardware previously
then theoretically it *should* work.

Since Lucid there has been a fair amount of work upstream to solve
issues and provide more stable support for 8xx.  However a lot of
features are disabled, missing, or buggy.  This may include 3D, Xv
video, TV output, and more.  I've also seen various reports of gpu
lockups, corruption, and other serious issues, although these might only
affect specific laptops or chipsets, or even just be hardware failures,
but we don't really have a reliable way to know for sure.

In any case, we're not taking bug reports at Launchpad for 8xx issues,
nor will be backporting patches.

So, Ubuntu might boot and run on your 8xx system just fine, but Ubuntu
engineers are not actively *supporting* that chipset in terms of
development work so if it does not work there won't be fixes from us.
You'll need to work directly with upstream at Intel to get development
support.

My advice to 8xx owners would be, ALWAYS test a livecd image thoroughly
before even considering upgrading.

-- 
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/941172

Title:
  do-release-update to Precise produces a hardware-not-support-in-Natty
  warning

Status in “update-manager” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “update-manager” source package in Precise:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  I ran "do-release-update -d" on a Lucid system to upgrade to Precise
  (which downloaded and ran version 0.156.6 of precise.tar.gz).

  As part of the pre-upgrade checking process, I got the following
  message:

    Your graphics hardware may not be fully supported in Ubuntu 11.04.

    The support in Ubuntu 11.04 for your intel graphics hardware is 
    limited and you may encounter problems after the upgrade. Do you want 
    to continue with the upgrade?

  Does this warning still apply to Precise?

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