Comment 4 for bug 941172

The error message sounds adequate to me, but I sympathize about warnings and errors that just leave you with more questions than answers. I'm not sure what exactly to say though.

But here's a brain dump of what I know. This is going to be way too blathery for just dropping into that error message, but maybe someone can massage a usable text out of it.

[Historical Background]

There are basically three families of chips in 8xx: i810 (810, 815), i830 (830, 845), and i855 (855, 865). These chips were manufactured early on in Intel's integrated graphics history. They were used in a wide variety of different laptops and motherboards by a wide number of vendors, and the way the chips were wired / integrated into the vendor's board could vary quite a bit. This also preceded Intel's open source graphics lab, so I believe the funding from Intel for 8xx support work is very low priority. I've also heard the documentation is rather sketchy, even internally to Intel.

All these factoids together have had the result that upstream 8xx support upstream has been more art than science. Bugs have tended to be very hardware-specific, and often fixing a lockup bug on one person's laptop will cause a regression on someone else's with exactly the same 8xx chip in some other laptop. Compounding the trouble is that few upstream developers have access to a wide enough variety of 8xx boxes to ensure their code changes have been sufficiently tested.

On top of all this, by now the 8xx hardware line is quite old. It's likely many systems suffer from hardware problems - power supply irregularities, loose/corroded soldering, loose wiring, etc. - which often have very similar symptoms to graphics issues. This can make debugging a given issue quite Fun.

Yet despite all these troubles, upstream *does* still take 8xx bug reports, and they do try to fix them as they have time. The current -intel driver *should* still operate on the i830 and i855 families (i810 is considered a lost cause now.)

Even so, here at the distro level we *don't* take 8xx bug reports for any 8xx chips, but instead direct people to discuss problems directly with upstream. All the problems that make supporting 8xx difficult for upstream affect us as well. Indeed, in the past we used to pull fixes from upstream, but they invariably broke other people's systems. We found we were expending a lot of developer and bug triager time chasing bugs, with little gain except just to annoy 8xx users who didn't know if their systems would work one week to the next. :-)

So, now we ship just what upstream provides. If it works and lets you run Ubuntu on your 8xx, that's great. If not, please go to bugs.freedesktop.org to provide upstream with feedback.

[Current Status]

In Precise, if you've had Ubuntu installed on your hardware previously then theoretically it *should* work.

Since Lucid there has been a fair amount of work upstream to solve issues and provide more stable support for 8xx. However a lot of features are disabled, missing, or buggy. This may include 3D, Xv video, TV output, and more. I've also seen various reports of gpu lockups, corruption, and other serious issues, although these might only affect specific laptops or chipsets, or even just be hardware failures, but we don't really have a reliable way to know for sure.

In any case, we're not taking bug reports at Launchpad for 8xx issues, nor will be backporting patches.

So, Ubuntu might boot and run on your 8xx system just fine, but Ubuntu engineers are not actively *supporting* that chipset in terms of development work so if it does not work there won't be fixes from us. You'll need to work directly with upstream at Intel to get development support.

My advice to 8xx owners would be, ALWAYS test a livecd image thoroughly before even considering upgrading.