Comment 350 for bug 252094

Bryce,

Thanks for the update, very informative. You mentioned in your post several reasons for not reverting to an older, more stable version of the -intel driver. And I agree that this would probably be counter-productive, in my experience the -intel driver has never really been stable on older chipsets. So my guess is that people would still be highly unsatisfied with the driver quality, the only difference would be that the bug reports would be against an old version and would no longer useful.

But, have you considered supplying a package with an older version of xserver that could run the i810 driver? Please note that I am not suggesting that Ubuntu rollback its xserver, just that it supply something like a xserver-xorg-legacy package that could replace the default xserver with an older version (one that supported i810) for users with older intel chipsets. Perhaps a little installation magic could pick the legacy driver depending on the detected hardware. I know that this is an ugly solution, and I recognize that simply fixing the bugs in the -intel driver is a more elegant approach. But, it has been over a year since Ubuntu stopped working properly on these chipsets. The most recent driver has rendered my system (and many others) completely and utterly unusable. And in all likelihood it will take many many more months before the regressions introduced by the -intel driver start to be pared down You asked for patience, but I think that the community has already been very patient. I think the most important thing at this point is to get things working again. And, ugly as it may be, this would restore basic functionality to many of the above users instantaneously (I just installed xserver 1.4.2, and my system has never worked better).

In your post, you suggested that releasing an older version "would inhibit our ability to work with upstream to gain real fixes to the problem" In fact, I would argue that releasing a legacy driver would only allow for a more sane release plan. Reading the notes by Keith Packard that you have cited above, it seems that Xorg is essentially treating -intel as a beta. Beta software is fine for early adopters who are willing to track down bugs and take the time to file intelligent bug reports, but it is counterproductive to distribute beta software at large. It does not produce more information, it simply infuriates individuals that have become unwilling beta-testers (see some of the above comments) and produces a large number of uninformed bug reports (see some of the duplicates). I think the best way to get to a working driver is to relieve some of the presure from the Xorg team by pushing out a legacy driver that gets normal users working systems, and then let the early adopters slowly work through the bugs in the -intel driver.

In your post, you also mentioned that releasing an outdated version "is the wrong thing to do." Well, it certainly doesn't feel right. And if everything was as it should, every version would improve upon the previous and releasing old versions would never be necessary. But alas, this does not seem to be the case. I think the right thing to do at this point is to get things working again.