[ubuntu-x] i8xx, again!

Christopher James Halse Rogers raof at ubuntu.com
Mon Sep 6 10:31:27 BST 2010


Hi,

On Mon, 2010-09-06 at 10:02 +0100, Charles Barnwell wrote:
> Christopher,
> 
> 
> We appreciate your continued support on this.
> 
> 
> I am supporting a group that uses LTSP with Dell clients using a
> mixture of these two cards:
> 
> 
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation
> 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 01)
> 
> 
> 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82865G Integrated
> Graphics Controller (rev 02)
> 
> 
> The 82865G cards work fine, but the Brookdale cards experience regular
> crashes.  This system was upgraded from Karmic (on Karmic the system
> was reliably stable) and all clients seem to be using the i915 driver
> rather than vesa driver.  How did the blacklisting in Lucid work?
> Would it not affect an upgrade?

In Lucid we stayed on the 2.9 version of the intel X driver (it was
already out of date then).  The 2.10 version dropped support for
userspace modesetting, so now if you disable KMS the intel X driver will
not load.

The blacklisting will just be the kernel's default in the absence of
other configuration.  If you've re-enabled KMS on Lucid and upgrade,
you'll still have KMS enabled.

> 
> 
> I have tried the workarounds described in
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes and the most
> successful was to enable KMS and disable DRI.  I tried to force use of
> VESA driver, but I never managed to get an acceptable resolution on
> the Brookdale cards.

One of the more… endearing qualities of the i8xx freezes are that which
workaround works best seem to be extremely hardware specific.  Which is
why there's a long list of possible solutions there!

> 
> 
> My big concern is that if you use option 1, and it really does force
> VESA driver then many people may experience poor resolution, which is
> not a good experience for new users.
> 

Yeah.  Ideally we'd give new users the intel driver.  The trick we're
trying is to balance “poor resolution and no 3D” against “doesn't bring
up the GUI” or “crashes every 5 minutes”.

> 
> If we can be sure that people would not experience crashes, but would
> have a good resolution then I also vote for option 1.
> 
> 
> I'm afraid we are going to be swapping the Brookdale machines for
> devices that have a different card, so I will not be able to help in
> any more diagnosis, but we really have to give this customer a stable
> system now.
> 

Perfectly reasonable.  The switch to a GPU memory manager has not been
kind on the i845 chips.
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