[ubuntu-x] Status of kernel X drivers

[Geir Ove Myhr]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 8:21 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> I guess the real question is, "how well does KMS work on the various 8xx
> cards"?  Geir, could you take a look through the current 8xx bug reports
> and evaluate how good or bad it is?  If KMS is working fine across the
> board, then we don't need to make any special provisions, which would be
> nice.

The main problem on 8xx is GPU hangs on 855GM and 845G. There have
been some reports that switching to UMS help, but most people report
that it doesn't make a difference. Another problem is that most bugs
are reported on Karmic, and I haven't seen as much testing on Lucid as
I would have liked [1].

The other big thing is missing support for accelerated overlay video
with KMS (bug 395932). This can be fixed with supported kernel patches
and -intel 2.10.0. If it is not fixed and UMS is dropped, we're in a
bad situation here.

> This would also help drive an answer to whether to move to 2.10 as
> planned or stick with 2.9.1.  Merging 2.10 is near the top of my todo
> list but I'm open to sticking with 2.9.x if we have solid reasons to do
> so.  But if we do that, we'd need to assemble a blocker list of bug
> reports that we can give to Intel.

My main worry is that it may be a bit late to catch any regressions in
2.10 now. 2.9.1 has proven quite stable. If we had had 2.10 in Lucid
soon after Q4 was released, we would have had more time. Also, I can't
seem to remember any bugs which was resolved by upgrading to 2.10.

[1]: One reason is that upstream had asked us to find the bad commits,
which we did, but it was most easily done in Karmic. Another problem
is that current batchbuffer dumps are useless on Lucid, making it hard
to troubleshoot.

Geir Ove