ubuntu-x-swat team mailing list archive

[Geir Ove Myhr <gomyhr@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Can we have a discussion on how things got to this point in the first
> place? Why did Karmic ship with such a fatally flawed Intel driver? Who
> made the decision that this code was suitable for a stable release?

I don't think such a discussion would be very fruitful [*]. What could
indeed be a fruitful discussion would be one about how to avoid
shipping an LTS in April with the same stability problems. Such a
discussion should take place on the ubuntu-x mailing list
(https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/Ubuntu-x) and not on a bug
report.

I'm not an expert on xorg, but it seems that the batchbuffer dumps we
have sent upstream so far has not triggered any response. From
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24825 it seems that what
will be needed is that somebody affected by these problems get their
hands dirty and do some git-bisecting in order to find where the
problems were introduced. Brian Rogers has already started on that bug
report, but has only come as far as finding that the problem does not
occur with kernel 2.6.30, but is there in 2.6.31-rc1 - irrespective of
intel driver version. A first step would be to make sure that this is
also the case here, and then try to identify the commit that triggers
the freeze. My impression is that this would give the upstream
developers something to work on.

[*] Here is my impression in case you find it enlightening: First, I
don't agree that the intel driver has become flawed recently. It has
improved a lot over the recent iterations (we had some freeze bugs
like this on i9xx that are now gone). The problem seems to be one
introduced in the kernel (maybe a change there triggered a
long-existing bug in the driver). Second, there seems to have been
very few people testing Ubuntu development releases on i8xx chipsets.
There was a call for testing on the ubuntu-x mailing list back in
April, with some - but not overwhelming - response. Bug reports for
freezes on 845G and 855GM only started ticking in late October, see
[1] and [2] for lists. At this time, we were already in final freeze,
and since these bugs are hard to fix, it was at the time unrealistic
to get it fixed before the release. I think that it was only well
after the release that it became clear that a lot of people had this
problem.

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-datecreated&field.tag=845g+freeze&field.tags_combinator=ALL
[2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-datecreated&field.tag=855gm+freeze&field.tags_combinator=ALL

-- 
[i845G] Display freezes (except for mouse pointer) without warning
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/484020
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X,
which is the registrant for xf86-video-intel.