xf86-video-intel-2.7.x experience

[Hasso Tepper <hasso%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Now, with Mesa and xserver upgraded I can share my experience with this on 
DragonFly. There are two important bugs in the intel driver and AFAICS 
upstream doesn't have any interest to fix these.

* XAA doesn't work at all. It crashes instantly on startup in somewhere at
  i965_batch_flush_notify(). Upstream closed all XAA related bugs long 
  time ago and will not fix any of these probably.

* With EXA some apps (kdm from KDE3 most notably for me) crash somewhere 
  at i965_prepare_composite(). I filed a bugreport in the upstream  
  bugzilla - https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=26034, but as 
  you can read from comment #3, I'm out of luck, seems ;(.

  There is a workaround though - use 'Option "EXANoComposite" "true"' in 
  the xorg.conf.

So, with following xorg.conf snippet it seems to be stable even with drm 
(the lastest MesaLib is required!) and reasonably fast (as Intel hardware 
can be).

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Generic Video Card"
        Driver          "intel"
        Option          "EXANoComposite"        "true"
EndSection

Note that this all about experience 965GM on DragonFly, so you mileage can 
vary of course. I hope that it helps though.


-- 
Hasso Tepper