Comment 171 for bug 541511

Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote : Re: [Bug 541511] Re: MASTER: [i855] GPU lockup (apport-crash)

We don't need further confirmations from people seeing the issue.

Also, we don't need further reports of how it was worked around; we know
there's several ways of working around it. Unfortunately what works for
one person doesn't for another.

This has been an extremely frustrating bug from a developer perspective,
probably almost as frustrating as it is from a user perspective. It
seems whenever we make a change to fix something for one set of users,
it just causes breakage for some other set. There does not seem to be
any particular combination of knob settings that makes things functional
for *all* users.

So what we've opted to do is turn off KMS for this hardware but pretty
much leave all other settings to defaults. So people for whom this
configuration works will have 3D and all the usual -intel functionality,
just not the boot prettiness. For the set of users that find this is
not a good configuration, we've documented the issue in the release
notes with a link to the various workarounds people have found, here:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes

If anyone discovers additional workarounds, or has ideas on improving
this documentation, please feel welcome to edit this page. It may help
your fellow 8xx users.

It is our hope that there will come to be upstream fixes that are viable
to backport. If we get enough fixes that we feel confident, we *might*
re-enable KMS for 8xx chips on lucid at some point.

There are likely to be a lot of patches flying around. If you wish to
provide them in a PPA, that's cool. Just be mindful that our goal
ultimately is to get a fix into Lucid, and time you can put towards that
goal could help a lot.

The nature of this bug is such that it's really sensitive to
conditions. So you may find a configuration or patch that makes the
issue totally go away on your system and someone else's, but breaks
things on 3 other people's systems with exactly the same hardware. So
getting a patch that fixes it for *everyone* is going to be really
tough.