[ubuntu-x] Final Maverick i830, i845g, i855 support

[Eric Appleman]

  On 09/12/2010 09:20 PM, Christopher James Halse Rogers wrote:
> Hello again!
>
> For Lucid we asked the kernel team to blacklist KMS on i830, i845&  i855
> to try to work around the instability in the intel drivers on those
> cards.
>
> This instability (while, apparently, slightly reduced by the 2.12 DDX)
> is still present in Maverick, so I asked the kernel team to re-enable
> the blacklist in a recent upload.
>
> Since we've got the 2.12 DDX with no userspace modesetting support, that
> means that these chips should get vesa.  There's an issue¹ with X
> actually loading vesa rather than fbdev or intel which I need to
> investigate which is preventing this from happening now.
>
> The other option for these cards is to use KMS + the fbdev driver².
>
> There have been a couple of concerns raised about vesa:
>   * Possibly less capable of proper suspend/resume than KMS.
>   * Won't drive the display in the native mode for laptops with a
> poorly-written video bios.
>
> fbdev+KMS will work where ever KMS works, and will set the native mode
> where ever KMS sets the native mode.  It is not capable of changing
> resolution, however.
>
> I've been persuaded that fbdev+KMS will provide a better experience for
> more people than kms-blacklist+vesa.  This is a final call for comment
> before I ask the kernel team to revert the blacklist for these cards and
> flick the switch in xorg-server to use fbdev rather than intel.
>
> ¹: Bug #633593:
> https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/633593
> ²: This is similar in some respects to the upstream “Shadow branch”
> work.
I'm okay with this. Do you guys want me to organize a hardware testing 
effort to flesh out how well this ends up working?