Bug 326457 – x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel issues 2.12.0

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description Ferry 2010-07-01 13:44:59 UTC]

Hi,

I had several issues with 2.12.0. Because of 2.9.0 not compiling any more and 2.10.0 and 2.11.0 being very unstable I didn't have much choice though. I'm not sure how to file this, as I can't really determine the cause of the bugs myself. I got some solutions from #intel-gfx though, so I figured I'd post them here and hope it'll help someone.

First of, I was running 2.6.34-r1 (gentoo) as kernel. The driver was quite stable, except for 2 issues:

1) Certain apps, most notably mplayer and virtualbox crashed X immediately. I resolved this by updating to 2.6.35-rc3 as already suggested in another post.

2) My dual monitor gave issues. The second monitor hardly showed anything (just a bit of the mouse). The setup was monitor 1 1400x1050 on the left, monitor 2 1280x1024. After switching resolution on the second monitor several times, I usually got a bit larger screen. Xrandr gave output that the screen! (not the monitor) current's value was 2048x1050. 1400+1280=2680 so there probably was the issue. #intel-gfx advised to upgrade libdrm to latest git. Copied the libdrm-2.4.21.ebuild to libdrm-9999.ebuild and ran 'ebuild libdrb-9999.ebuild manifest' against it, after this it allowed me to build the git version.

And indeed, the screen instantly came up with proper resolution and fully usable. However, most windows now had a grey overlay over it. According to #intel-gfx this issue is with the shadows certain windows drop due to compositing (gnome bar's didn't have it, gnome terminal didn't, everything else I tried, including the gnome menu's and the textboxes providing info when you hover over things, had it). Apparently it's something with the order of the layers (shadow is supposed to be lowest layer, but it even went over other windows (for example gnome terminal) when I dragged a window with the issues over a window without them). I recalled enabling metacity compositing long ago and disabled it under (gconf) app/metacity/general/compositing_manager checkbox. Since then, no issues.

The guy in #intel-gfx said this without knowing my wm, from his reply 'stop using a compositing wm' I figure this issue probably exists with all/most of em.

My card is an intel 945GM btw.

As stated, not sure what to do with this info. I wanted to let the devs here and the users know about possible solutions, but no clue what the proper way is in this case. Sorry if it's the wrong one.

I'll gladly provide any additional info required within my abilities.

Reproducible: Always

[Comment 1 Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn 2010-07-01 15:22:24 UTC]

Intel hardware before 965 is known to have issues when the screen dimensions exceed 2048x2048 pixels. Try vertically aligning your monitors.

[Comment 2 Ferry 2010-07-01 15:38:13 UTC]

My rendering beyond the 2048 (horizontal) dimension has always been fine. Only, iirc, it used to switch back to software rendering (or at least disabling hardware acceleration).

I'm no dev... not sure how much of it is true, but the guy in #intel-gfx that told me to get the latest libdrm git (which does solve it, so it works with the 2680 horizontal res currently :)) also stated that with this libdrm version, dimensions beyond 2048x2048 will be hardware accelerated, which wasn't true before (I don't know how to verify this though, if you have suggestions :)).

[Comment 3 Rémi Cardona (RETIRED) 2010-07-01 18:13:37 UTC]

1) use app-portage/layman to add the x11 overlay
2) unmask x11-libs/libdrm-9999
3) emerge -1 x11-libs/libdrm
4) just in case, do a complete poweroff, wait for 10 sec, boot sequence

Thanks