Intel Still Playing With i830GM/845G Stability

Intel is still working on some minor xf86-video-intel driver changes to address stability issues for the very old i830GM and i845G chipsets. A new Intel X.Org driver update was released on Wednesday to take care of more changes.

Chris Wilson put out the 17th point release in the xf86-video-intel 2.20.x series. Chris describes the single major change of this release:

A minor update to prepare for co-operating with the kernel over managing stability on 830gm/845g. On this pair of chipsets, the kernel will perform an extra copy of the batchbuffer into reserved memory, which prevents them from randomly dying. However, that extra copy does have a noticeable impact upon throughput, so we also have a mechanism for userspace to opt-out of the kernel workaround and take responsibility for ensuring its batches are coherent.

Chris in total made 49 driver changes for this latest point release while most other Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are focused upon other areas of the Intel Linux graphics stack.

The list of other changes can be found via the release announcement. As usual, many of the DDX Intel driver changes are around the SNA acceleration architecture.