[Intel-gfx] Adapting old i830 driver to recognize Pineview

[Gabriel M. Beddingfield]

Hi Luis,

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, louis at museresearch.com wrote:

> Hi all,
>  We are developing pro audio gear based on an Intel Atom board which uses
> the Pineview G chipset.  Unfortunately, our OS is based on Fedora 8
> which only has X.org 1.3.0.  I was wondering if anyone knew whether it
> would be feasible to alter FC8's xf86-video-i810-1.6.5 and
> xf86-video-intel-2.1.1 drivers to be able to detect and use the Pineview
> chipset rather than falling back to VESA.  And, if so, what would be
> involved?  The goal is not 3d acceleration but rather just widescreen
> video resolution support.

I've been doing exactly this (pro audio, Intel N450), but 
with Ubuntu/Jaunty.

My Xorg isn't /that/ old... but I was able to get it 
accomplished for 1.6.0 like this (in reverse order :-)):

   * I backported xf86-video-intel 2.9.x.  (If
     you do >= 2.10.x, you will need a kernel
     >= 2.6.32.)

   * In backporting the driver, I had to re-enable
     some scheme where the xserver looks up PCI
     ID numbers to pick the driver.

   * Backporting xf86-video-intel required me
     to backport libdrm, first.  Which also
     required me to backport some other Xorg
     libs like xcb, xvmc.

   * Because linux-libc-dev supplied the headers
     for drm, but I needed up-to-date DRM headers
     for xf86-video-intel.  So, I had to package
     my own kernel and linux-libc-dev with the
     drm headers removed (and provided by libdrm).
     This is actually common practice today, but
     wasn't back then.

All in all, it was a pretty painful process... but I didn't 
have to rebuild the entire Xorg system.  :-)

FYI, with a kernel >=2.6.32, I had problems with the
boot-splash theme... and you /must/ enable kernel 
modesetting.

HTH,
Gabriel