CFT for cairo 1.12 and 8.x survey

[Rick C. Petty]

Not sure if you're still interested in the 8.x survey...

All my desktop (and server) machines are on stable/8.  I gave 9.1-R a
try but it was severely impaired on all the hardware I tested it on.  I
rely upon functionality deprecated in 9.x and completely removed in 10
(see below).

Due to the lack of recent KMS support for my Radeon HD 4850, I tried 9.x
from this weekend.  I needed VT(9) since the screen goes black with
radeondms loaded.  With dri1/radeon loaded, old x.org segfaults.  With
dri2/radeondms and NEW_XORG, the driver reports DRI version mismatch.  I
couldn't get graphics/dri and graphics/libdrm to build off the dev ports
tree in 9.x.  With xorg-server-1.12.4_1,1 and dri1 I have a somewhat
working X server.  However starting any VirtualBox instance panics the
machine.

Besides all of that, VT is very buggy: leftover artifacts, and I have to
hit ^L after navigation and before/after any edit or the cursor is on
the wrong line.  That's almost worse than a completely black screen.

I'm off to give stable/10 a try, but I'm not holding my breath....

-- Rick C. Petty

~~

FYI:  8.x functionality I still use:

All my drives are geom_mirror'd and frequently a disk will drop
(usually with a DMA timeout, but sometimes without any syslog message at
all).  This happens on _all_ my SATA/AHCI controllers, including:

	AMD SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0
	ATI IXP700/800
	nVidia nForce MCP61
	nVidia nForce MCP77
	Promise PDC40718
	SiI 3124
	SiI 3512

In 8.x and earlier, I can almost always (99.9%) get it working with:

	atacontrol detach ata<N>
	atacontrol attach ata<N>

This functionality is missing from ATA_CAM.  Any combination of
camcontrol's start/stop/load/eject/rescan/reset commands do not work!
In fact on some chipsets unplugging and replugging the data cable
(which is especially dangerous when using multiple disks) does NOT
work with ATA_CAM although it works just fine in 8.x.

So ATA_CAM and 9.x is unusable for me.  I've tried 9.2-pre with
NO_ATA_CAM and even though I have AHCI disabled in the BIOS the disks
show up as ahci anyway.  A kernel built with "nooption ATA_CAM" and
"nodevice ahci" detects my SATA chipset but no disks.