ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 04:39:48PM -0000, AD5XJ wrote:
> What a monumental fubar. There are millions of Intel 8xx machines out
> there worldwide. Most have the Dell brand like mine. Exactly what drives
> such a decision that excludes so many people.

Calm down.  Yeah I know it's a pisser.

But it doesn't mean 8xx is a lost cause or that we don't care, just that
here in the Ubuntu distro we're not officially providing "development
support".  That does not mean we won't ship working 8xx, just that we're
going to provide the upstream driver "as-is" and not do any
tweaks/patches/config changes to it.

I know your question is probably rhetorical, but I'm going to answer it
anyway.

In a way, I think this is for the best.  In the past upstream has
neglected 8xx a good deal, and we've gotten tons and tons of bug reports
about 8xx problems.  In the past I've put a lot of manhours into 8xx
pulling patches, fiddling with settings, forwarding bug reports, and
even poking Intel engineers in person.

But it has proven to be a game of wack-a-mole.  At the distro level, we
find too often when we fix a bug for one set of users, it just causes
breakage for some other set.

The problem is not that there was a distinct set of 8xx cards that just
need support.  8xx was "special" in that hardware manufacturers had
leeway in how they wired the chips into their system, so there can be
wide variations from one system to the next, and tuning the software to
work properly is more art than science.  It is very trial and error, and
very hard to do if you don't have the hardware in front of you.

But the good news is that upstream has started looking into some of
these issues, which is good becauyse they're much better situated to
figure out the issues.  The best thing we can do at the distro level is
to *not* try to work around problems ourselves, but get out of the way
and ship as clean to upstream as possible, and encourage people to
supply testing feedback directly to upstream.


> I for one will not go out and purchase compatible equipment. Is Ubuntu
> "nudging" users into their idea of what equipment we should use?

Yes, basically.  Actually, the nudge I intend to give is that 8xx owners
wanting to stick with incompatible equipment and wanting to participate
in QA via bug reports can best help by working with upstream directly.
They need testers, and they need higher bandwidth than is possible when
I'm having to be a go-between you and them.

Lucid was the last version we really worked in earnest on 8xx, since we
knew that release would be around for a while.  So we figure that's an
option too.  (Canonical doesn't have any hardware contracts for
supporting 8xx; we did the work just as community service.)  Debian and
other distros may also be carrying older versions of the video driver,
so those might be an option for some folk too.  The 8xx issues are
largely upstream and so should be cross-distro but you might get lucky
experimenting with other distros.

Anyway, we are not going to blacklist 8xx or excise it from the -intel
driver, and it may work for many people.  But we're not going to invest
energies into futzing with it, backporting patches, or forwarding any
more bug reports.  So closing bug reports and nuding people to go
upstream is the best we can do.  Hopefully if they do so, it'll make 8xx
better down the road, and maybe we can give better support in the distro
for it some day.