Call for testing: X.org server update [URGENT]

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 10:24:29AM -0700, Erik Andersen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 07:52, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Hello fellow developers,
> >
> > On April 15, a major memory leak was introduced into the X.org server
> > which causes the computer to get slower and slower over some hours,
> > and finally becoming totally sluggish. This is tracked in
> > https://launchpad.net/bugs/565981 .
> >
> > Thanks to the tireless investigations of Robert Hooker and Tormod
> > Volden, this was tracked down to a recently added patch which fixed
> > some crashes intoduced by the GLX 1.4 enablement patches. A first
> > attempt to fixing the memory problem wasn't successful unfortunately,
> > and isn't easy.
> >
> > The safest solution right now is to roll back all three patches. This
> > will fix both the memory leak and thus the performance problem, as
> > well as avoid the X crashes which were introduced by the GLX 1.4
> > enabling.  While we had this combination before, we haven't tested it
> > with the current lucid userspace, and thus we need some extensive
> > tests on various hardware to get more data about it.
> >
> > I set up a wiki page to explain how to install the proposed packages
> > and for adding feedback:
> >
> >  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/GEMLeak
> >
> > On Friday we will check how much and which kind of feedback we got,
> > and depending on that will decide about the risk of putting it into
> > Lucid final, or doing an early SRU. (We need testing feedback in
> > either case, of course).
> >
> > Thank you in advance for helping with testing!
> >
> > Martin
> >
> > --
> Does this affect all hardware or only some hardware? When I try to
> reproduce the bug with
> for t in `seq 1 10`; do eog /usr/share/backgrounds ; echo `grep
> "object bytes" /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/gem_objects` `ps ocomm,vsz,rss
> 1020|grep X`; done
> I get
> grep: /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/gem_objects: No such file or directory

It affects only certain video drivers.  For instance, -nvidia carries
its own GLX implementation and thus is unaffected.