Kernel Intel GPU driver and ports

[Andriy Gapon]

on 23/07/2011 18:41 Koop Mast said the following:
> On Sat, 2011-07-23 at 17:04 +0300, Kostik Belousov wrote: 
>> From what I see using web browser, your plan is to update the stack in
>> the ports. I suspect this might cause problems for non-Intel cards or
>> for those who use in-tree i915.ko. In particular, new Mesa might not
>> work.
> 
> That is a good possibility. I only have a sandybridge intel card to
> test. The only issue currently know are the nouveau driver (which needs
> mesa 7.4.4 and doesn't work with 7.6.x), and the old intel driver.
> 
> If it turns out other drivers don't work with the new setup, obviously
> we need to make it so that they will work. Although I'm currently got
> half a mind to just drop the nouveau driver.

I just would like to report that with ports from the experimental x11 repository
everything still works fine for me[*] with radeon hardware and driver, including
OpenGL stuff (glxgears, KDE4 whistles and bells).

[*] It's better to say that there are no regressions as the following
long-standing bugs still affect me:

1. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28181
I will submit my local patch against xorg-server-1.10.3 sources a little bit later.

2. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27627
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28607
The problem can be considered minor but I still prefer to build xf86-video-ati
from older sources.  That doesn't introduce any regressions for me comparing to
the latest version of the driver and does make the problem go away.

I wish for some tool that could compare code paths before and after the
problematic commit to find the regression.  Apparently the problem affects only
non-KMS case [**].

[**] Where KMS may actually stand for DRI2, GEM-over-TTM.  It seems that radeon CS
(command stream?) ioctls are only used in KMS environment.  People have been known
to call that collection of features as a single "KMS" super-feature.  Maybe
because they've come together in Linux and it is not expected that one of them is
present but not other.  But I have diverged from the main topic of this report.

-- 
Andriy Gapon