[i865] Jaunty: DRI disabled with i865

[Edmundo]

I have video on my jaunty box, but I have no hardware acceleration. It's being disabled by intel's driver.

From Xorg.0.log:
(**) intel(0): DRI is disabled because it fails to run on 845G and 865G chips. (See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/304871)

I'll send my xorg.conf (hacked) and the accompanying log in a follow up, then I'll send stock xorg.conf (created by Xorg -configure and its log... neither provides hardware acceleration, anyway).

[Edmundo (eantoranz)]

Xorg.0.log without any xorg.conf

[Edmundo (eantoranz)]

It's using exa

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Yes, we had to disable DRI in order to work around the freeze during boot. I hope we can re-enable it once a better solution is at hand.

[KDontenville (kevin-keepnet)]

Is there anything we can do to help test proposed solutions - I use 865 and 945 chipsets which both seem to be suffering from new driver problems and so would like to see this improved in time for Jaunty - they are very common older chipsets.

[Lee Daniel Crocker (lee-piclab)]

I can confirm that this happens on my Shuttle XPC with an 865G. Neither of the workarounds I've seen (using 16-bit depth or UXA) work, so Compiz is a total no-go on my machine. Will have to downgrade to Intrepid until this is fixed--everything is hunky-dory there.

[Toon Verstraelen (toon-verstraelen)]

Is it possible to downgrade only the relevant packages instead of the entire distro? Which packages should be downgraded and to what version?

[idansof (idansof)]

Downgrading to the older driver is described here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4

[Toon Verstraelen (toon-verstraelen)]

idansof wrote:
> Downgrading to the older driver is described here:
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4
>

I have tried the instructions, but they did not work for me. Performance
is still much worse than in 8.10. A quick look at the table on the
bottom of that page reveals that I'm by far not the only person with
this experience. There are probably be other packages that must be
downgraded too. I've tried to downgrade also the kernel to version
2.6.27-14. Didn't help.

[idansof (idansof)]

I havn't tried the downgrade path yet, but like you, I'm frustrated with the state of the intel driver in intrepid.

I'm willing to try any replacement driver, even if it's alpha state.

[Robert Hooker (sarvatt)]

it's been disabled by 116_8xx_disable_dri.patch in the official xserver-xorg-video-intel ubuntu packages. You can try using drivers from this PPA which has git snapshots from upstream without that patch. This is for jaunty or karmic, intrepid ones are not maintained in there any longer. Don't forget to upgrade drm at the same time if you are grabbing individual packages, it would be better to add it to your sources and upgrade the whole stack at the same time.

https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

If anyone can verify with sarvatt's git snapshot that DRI now works properly on i865, we could drop that patch. (I *think* it should work properly now, so may drop it anyway, but it would be better if we could get people to test and positively confirm first.)

[Edmundo (eantoranz)]

Well... I enabled this repo:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu jaunty main

I tried running X without an xorg.conf.

It started with exa, so no acceleration. The same old message about
the LP to look at.

So I generated a xorg.conf with Xorg -configure

Edited it and set AccelMethod to uxa, set DRI to true. I still have no
acceleration (though it didn't hung up) and the CPU consumption by the
Xorg process is excessively high (though it goes down, the latency of
the system is rather high as I'm writing this mail). Anyways, taken
from the log:
(**) intel(0): Using UXA for acceleration
(**) intel(0): DRI is disabled because it fails to run without
freezing on i810 and i865G chips. (See LP 304871)

I'm sending the full log plus the hacked xorg.conf.

Anything else I should try? I'm going back to exa (or vesa) to see if
the system is more responsive.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Well, we've dropped patch 116 in karmic so are no longer forcing DRI disabled. If for some reason you might find DRI still not working in Karmic, it's going to be due to some different bug, so I'd encourage you to file a new bug in that case. But hopefully it'll just work perfectly...

[Edmundo (eantoranz)]

No love for jaunty?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 01:10:38PM -0000, Edmundo wrote:
> No love for jaunty?

The fix is not feasible for backporting directly into the released
Ubuntu, however we maintain a PPA with updated drivers you can give a
try to:

   https://edge.launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa

Note that -intel's driver architecture has changed extremely radically
between Jaunty and Karmic (which is why we had to ask people to test the
Alpha-2 CD instead of just installing a few debs on Jaunty.)

Bryce

[idansof (idansof)]

The xorg-edgers driver works flawlessly with an updated kernel(2.6.28-13)

10x!

[GallaKo (gallako)]

After the updates for Intel Cards from Xorg, system works flawlessly just as idansof sayd!!
:)

[Edmundo (eantoranz)]

Well, I tested on jaunty with the repository named by Brice before,
and it didn't work.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

I get to the background of KDM, but no login page shows up. I could
restart by using the alt-sysrq keys. I didn't test starting "startx"
from the command line, though.

So perhaps I'll just have to wait for kinky kangaroo to show up.