Dear developers, I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know my experiences running various Free- and open source operating systems on my Dell Latitude D400 (Centrino platform) laptop. This started when I wanted to run Ubuntu Maverick, this didn't work and gave me a blank, black screen on the Live CD. After some searching I found http://www.glasen-hardt.de who provided a working ISO with some fixed drivers. A kernel update broke it again and installing the patches manually broke too. What's more, when the system worked I had various artifacts in the interface, the most prominent being blacked-out contextual menu's. On a working running system I upgraded to Natty, which broke it again. A blank, black screen right after X started. Fed up I decided to try Fedora 15. This worked only in "safe mode" (i guess Vesa driver) and gave me only "fallback" in Gnome 3, a terrible compromise, due to the 855GM being "blacklisted". Tired of my GNU/Linux troubles I decided to install PC-BSD 8.2 and guess what? Blank screen upon X initialization. I hate to tell you what the system is running right now, but I think you can guess. Will this be fixed or improve in the future or should I go looking for a new machine?
I've just placed an order for a D400 with a shocking pink lid. Misery shared is misery doubled, right?
So, the reason why it appears that Fedora have chosen to blacklist 855gm is that it misrenders the gnome-shell. In fallback mode, you have hw acceleration, or would if Fedora have not also blacklisted it for historical reasons. Performance of UXA is not bad and renders correctly, and 855gm also benefits from the switch to SNA. We don't directly support *BSD and GEM has not yet been fully ported to the *BSD variants, but xf86-video-intel-2.9.1 should run in UMS mode. As far as I can tell, other than the buggy GL driver, your main gripe is with the distributions...
The core of my bug report comes from dealing with these two issues, and you can see why using the Intel driver for the 855gm is blacklisted by various distributions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Mavericki8xxStatus "X freezes (GPU lockups) are still being experienced on i830, i845, and i855 chips. Although there have been various attempts to fix these for Ubuntu 10.10 we have not managed to produce an acceptable fix. To ensure that users with these cards get a stable graphical environment by default we no longer automatically load the Intel driver on these cards. This results in the fbdev driver loading, which does not provide any ability to change resolution, video acceleration, or 3D." https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes To quote a bit: "Switching to -vesa has been found to 100% stop the freezes. However, this regresses a lot of functionality: No 3D hw acceleration, no accelerated video, no HD resolutions, poor external monitor support. Probably other issues too. Workaround C: Use a -intel DDX driver other than 2.9.1" This therefore seems to point to an issue with the 855GM in the Intel driver, causing instability and lockups in the X server with various workarounds which have only partialy resolved the issue, and only Vesa or fbdev fallbacks are presented.
(In reply to comment #3) > The core of my bug report comes from dealing with these two issues, and you can > see why using the Intel driver for the 855gm is blacklisted by various > distributions: > > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Bugs/Mavericki8xxStatus Purely a Ubuntu issue for not providing the upstream fixes.
Opensuse 11.4 bug report: [i855GM] Flickering and rendering Corruption when Desktop Effects are enabled. https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=593463 This is also something I have observed, and turning off "desktop effects" (eg. composing) resolved the issue here.
This issue is affecting a hardware component which is not being actively worked on anymore. Moving the assignee to the dri-devel list as contact, to give this issue a better coverage.
As far as I can tell, the issues described here affecting xf86-video-intel on Linux have been fixed (as of xf86-video-intel, linux-3.5), and mesa is mostly operable again for gnome-shell on 8xx (as of mesa-8.0).
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