F10 and built-in Intel graphics [SOLVED]

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Tuesday 17 March 2009 19:18, Matthew Saltzman wrote:
>
> I can't find the other e-mail in which someone suggested using XAA
> acceleration, but that seems to have worked so far.  Thanks, all!

It doesn't work. It improves the time between two crashes, but does not 
eliminate them. The only workaround that makes intel drivers stable atm is to 
add Option "NoAccel" "true" into xorg.conf, but that kind of defeats the 
purpose of having a supported, open source, 3D accelerated driver.

I have also set XAA instead of EXA, and it does slightly improve the 
situation, but don't rely on it.

The problem here seems not to be just the transition from the old XAA to the 
new EXA. The bug is somewhere deeper, and it looks like to be an interplay of 
various things in the intel driver itself, the kernel, the X, the usage of 3D 
acceleration by the apps on top of X and so on. That is why crashes appear to 
be random, why it is almost impossible to trigger the bug intentionally and 
why there is no fix for cca 5 months now.

<rant>
So much for the famous Open Source support. If it were a nVidia bug, it would 
be just fixed in the next release of their closed-source driver. Even ATI's 
buggy flgrx driver gets fixed when the bug is severe enough. And here we are 
having the source completely open for the intel driver, and a bug that so 
radically affects all Intel cards is not fixed for half a year now...
</rant>

Best, :-)
Marko