Security update carried along a broken i810 driver for Intel 830 and up

[Alan Hourihane]

On Wed, 2005-09-21 at 21:45 -0400, Jim Cornette wrote:
> History of bugs encountered.
> Inetl 865G would randomly lockup. The Intel 815 video card worked. A 
> change was made for the 830 card referencing the below excerpt from Xorg 
> bug 1084.
> 
> AlanH's changes for the dualhead i830 support breaks the i810 driver..
> 
> for a start it now requires that the pI810->LpRing is xalloc'ed but this doesn't
> happen on the i810 driver, only in the i830_driver.c, I think also some of the
> cursor mem stuff probably also needs to be changed for the i810/5...
> 
> I've cc'ed Alan I'm not sure if it is his work or Keiths.. Alan can you fixup
> the i810/5 (do you have the hardware?) I've got some here but I'm not that great
> with the 2D drivers yet...
> 
> 
> When the change took place, the random lockups with the 865G ceased 
> while the Intel 815 would not start.
> A patch was submitted to get the Intel 815 card working again, the 
> change introduced a refresh problem that was longstanding. Before the 
> Intel 810/815 cards were busted, I never experienced any problems with 
> any graphical server.
> 
> For the refresh problem after the 810/815 driver, xorg bug # 1817 is a 
> fair bug to reference.
> 
> Both bugs were fixed, but seemed to be caused trying to make the Intel 
> 830 happy and massage it to keep the 810/815 chipsets working again.
> 
> I'm always afraid that making changes to the driver for one chipset will 
> cause the videocard at the other end of the spectrum to stop working.
> 
> I just see personalities between the different video cards to be worthy 
> of having seperate drivers.
> 
> With the recent xorg-x11 security version that Fedora released, it broke 
> a lot of videocards, mostly Intel 830 or better. The Intel 815 card that 
> I have was not effected by the pci related error that broke the other 
> cards. I did not see any bug reports referring to 810/815 video cards 
> either.
> 
> I guess if the difficulty between maintaining a "one driver fits all" or 
> maintaining a "goldilocks " version for the different performance 
> versions of Intel video chipsets.

Jim,

Your right that the LpRing problem did affect i810/i815 cards and that
was solely to do with my lack of testing on it. I should have been a
little more clear in my response meaning that if there are any current
bugs. But....

Unfortunately, evolution means that sometimes things break. Regardless
of whether things changed within the video driver or not. You've seen a
problem that is caused inside the Xserver with the RedHat problem, and
it has nothing to do with the i810 driver at all. No matter how you
split the video drivers up that would have been caused either way.

Minimizing the problems is always a goal, but testing and bug reporting
are always a necessity.

By all means, if you have a bug, report it on bugzilla, I'll always try
and get around to taking a look. But I really don't see a need for
splitting the driver up.

Alan.