| Geico Caveman 2006-08-08, 1:14 pm |
| Hi
I am a long time Linux user (Debian testing being my distro of choice). My
laptop, with an Intel graphics accelerator (Intel 855GM), worked perfectly
with Xorg (ver. <= 6.9.0) and the associated mesa and drm packages.
Hardware acceleration worked - could play foobilliard and other heavy
OpenGL games, etc. Then one fine day, as is my wont, I upgraded my Xorg
packages (got no bug reports - must have upgraded the day these got into
testing), etc. Things have been horrible since - DRI does not work like it
used to, and for a while (until I discovered the fix at
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...=345914&trim=no ), I was
forced to use the ultra slow VESA driver in my xorg.conf (with no ability
to present stuff from my laptop, etc.). Now, after that fix and compiling a
new kernel (the fixed xorg core package complained about a version mismatch
between i915 kernel driver and xorg), I thought I was home free. But
glxinfo showed up the following problem :
ERROR! sizeof(I830DRIRec) does not match passed size from device driver
libGL warning: 3D driver returned no fbconfigs.
libGL error: InitDriver failed
libGL error: reverting to (slow) indirect rendering
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: No
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.2
Apparently, this is also a serious bug arising from a mismatch between xorg
and mesa libraries (which in turn need drm) :
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=359328
The solutions specified therein involve getting CVS versions of drm and
mesa. I do not mind compiling stuff (which I am doing right now) but all
this mess points at a major cockup somewhere along the line. I have a few
questions - not that I personally want answers to these, but I think that
these answers would be important for the future of Xorg. Some of these are
Debian specific :
1. Didn't the faulty versions spend enough time in Debian unstable for these
problems to get flagged and hence get stopped from getting into testing ?
2. Are Xorg and Mesa developed completely independently of each other ?
3. Now, Intel 855GM and other Intel graphics cards are fairly ubiquitous
pieces of hardware - not some obscure undocumented hardware that just came
on the market. I have no idea about the numbers, but judging from price
competition from Nvidia and ATI, one would imagine that these must form a
majority or at the very least, an unignorable significant fraction of all
laptops out there. Most damningly, the previous versions of Xorg and mesa
worked with this graphics chip. Then how in the world did such a mess come
to be ?
I am sure there are more disturbing questions that could be raised but I
have gotten a little curious about what is going on, given the mess this
has caused.
I am sure that Xorg developers work very hard and Xorg 7 is a major advance,
but the old maxim of "First, do no harm". Its not a purely Debian issue as
I have seen people using other distros fall into this as well - and the
fact that a CVS source code is supposed to fix this, means that the the
problem (or at least a good part of it) definitely lies upstream.
Thoughts invited.
|