Gutsy: Intel should be preferred over 810
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
xorg (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
High
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Binary package hint: xserver-xorg
I just removed after upgrade to Gutsy /etc/X11/xorg.conf and did
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
to get a new default configuration.
It came up with i810 driver for me. This should *never* happen by default in any circumstances! It is absolutely intolerable if Gutsy will work out of the box like this. The default Gutsy installation must prefer intel over i810 in case both seem to support the hardware.
Reasons:
1. i810 is absolutely hopeless with widescreen modes. The only hope for getting those working is 915resolution, which has got its own bugs and is not installed by default. This means that the live CD environment and default desktop looks blurry and horrible no matter what. (I would like to point out that Intel has got globally ~60% market share of display adapters. Where I live 95% of sold displays are TFTs and of which some 50% are widescreen. We are not talking of a marginal group of people affected by this issue.) The intel driver however works wonderfully out of the box with widescreen modes.
2. i810 is notoriously bad with XV, causing the dreaded BadAllocs which crash the multimedia applications. You have to know to add stuff like
Option "VideoRam" "65536"
Option "CacheLines" "1980"
Option "LinearAlloc" "16000"
to xorg.conf or you are affected. Which then again can break compiz-fusion (the last line in fact does, but without that you have ca. 1/100 chance of video actually trashing XV until you restart when using gma950). These are old bugs that no one will ever fix because the attention moved to the new driver couple years ago already. The intel driver has got significantly better working xv which seems to be just working, and does not cause side effects.
3. Xrandr, enabling vga outputs and couple more advanced tricks are far more likely to work with intel driver than i810. Especially laptop users and people that own pivot panels are affected by this...
Please, do whatever to fix it. It reduces so much pain from ordinary users that you have no idea. Making sure intel gets used when appropriate should be considered imho as release CRITICAL issue.
Thank you for your bug report and for helping to make Ubuntu better.
You are correct that -i810 should be deprecated in favor of -intel. On my hardware (a Dell 1505n), when running sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg, it correctly selects -intel. There is some hardware that we are not certain -intel will work properly.
Have you verified that your system works properly when you manually change "i810" to "intel"? If so, please provide the output of 'lspci -vvnn' so we can update discover-data accordingly.