Ubuntu & Debian Abandon Intel X.Org Driver For Most Hardware, Moves To Modesetting DDX

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu & Debian Abandon Intel X.Org Driver For Most Hardware, Moves To Modesetting DDX

Ubuntu and Debian (and thus other Debian-based distributions too) have abandoned the xf86-video-intel X.Org driver for all recent generations of Intel graphics hardware and instead makes use of the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver in its place...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Debian-Abandon-Intel-DDX

[imirkin]

Try "xlock -mode wator" and watch the slideshow. modesetting has very different performance characteristics to normal accelerated drivers, and many older applications will suffer.

[axfelix]

Interesting! I'm not convinced this is the best idea but I can certainly see the logic -- I think DRI3 + SNA is still by far the most performant possible configuration for Intel, but I still have to edit xorg.conf to enable it on Arch, so I can see Ubuntu not wanting to both.

[duby229]

Well there is no stable ddx for intel hardware so pretty much everyone is screwed anyway. It might make a difference in scenario's where the two ddx's hit different hardware paths. But modesetting is buggy as hell on intel hardware too. The only difference I can see is that intel supports their ddx and not modesetting, so in scenarios where they release fixes for their ddx Ubuntu and Debian users will be left in the cold.

[rabcor]

Couldn't just like.... patch them themselves? Isn't intel's a better driver to begin with?

[uid313]

I hope that soon all drivers are ported over to DRI3 so that DRI2 can stripped from the code base in order to slim it down.

[darkbasic]

Finally, it was almost impossible to stand the Intel driver bugs...

[kenjo]

wow that was a big step backwards. The modesetting driver on my skylake system has terrible tearing really really bad all over. moving windows playing video. had to go back to the old driver.

[Ericg]

wow that was a big step backwards. The modesetting driver on my skylake system has terrible tearing really really bad all over. moving windows playing video. had to go back to the old driver.

Report a bug. I've got Skylake (also Broadwell, on laptop) + Modesettting on my desktop and have zero issues.

[dungeon]

Try "xlock -mode wator" and watch the slideshow.

I tried to run that, but it seems that app was removed from Debian something like 10 years ago