ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Robert Hooker <sarvatt@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yeah, by the point he posted that set of logs the patch was already
there which would force it to use nv because the pci id did exist even
though it didn't work. The main problem is that we need to delete the
xorg.conf entirely (and the pci ids) for xserver to use it's internally
generated default driver priority system which would get around this
issue. That has some problems in practice that I've run into where
people have had framebuffer drivers by the kernel which can make the
detections skip over some KMS drivers in favor of the fbdev ones..
Leaving the xorg.conf around and sticking to the pci.ids files is a
horrible way to go about this because each driver handles it
differently, and there are major problems with the way -nv in particular
ends up having it done because a large portion of the supported cards do
not get id's generated. One thing I noticed in this regard -- In the
livecd-rootfs script a very old bug fix is included (that isn't relevant
anymore per tjaalton) which deletes then touches an empty xorg.conf and
even just having a blank one like that will screw up in this manner.

Line 477 here -
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/livecd-rootfs/trunk/annotate/head%3A/livecd.sh

One partial solution I can see would be to drop the xorg.conf completely
at least on livecd's. Just dropping the xorg.conf would let xservers
automatic configuration mechanism work which would let each brand of
cards have their own priority table and the server will try to load each
driver and then let the driver decide if its compatable or not before
moving on to the next in the list. For instance on my intel graphics, it
sets up a priority table of intel > i810 > vesa > fbdev and works its
way down the list if the previous driver claims it doesn't support it.
i810 should be removed probably as a side note, and we will have to make
fbdev not try to claim it's the matching driver because of the small
problem that kms has when its a module and there are framebuffer devices
available packed into our initrds by the greedy initramfs-tools scripts.
I have attached my /var/log/Xorg.0.log to show how it works when no
xorg.conf exists, I didn't know it was this smart either :)

I think it would be possible for instance for ubuntu to carry a patch
against hw/xfree86/common/xf86AutoConfig.c in the xserver package to
change around the autodetection priorities for specific troublesome
cards which can be matched in a wildcard manner instead of manually
adding them to the ids. It just so happens this is how fedora is
handling changing nouveau to the default nvidia driver through this
patch.

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/xorg-x11-server/F-11/xserver-1.6.1-nouveau.patch?view=markup

Also notice they specifically force all nvidia cards in the 084x and
086x series (of which the 9100M G in this bug report belongs to) to use
vesa because it is unsupported by anything else?

Anyway, these are just my thoughts on it after discussing it with people
who understand how it works alot more than I do. I hope we can get it
worked out so it's a painless release :)

** Attachment added: "Xorg.0.log referenced halfway into the post."
   http://launchpadlibrarian.net/27908890/Xorg.0.log.txt

-- 
9100m G   card (for acer aspire 4350)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/321613
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