Posts Tagged ‘Xserver’

Solved: Xserver lock-ups in Ubuntu 10.04 with intel GFX

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

Posted in: , , System engineering, open source, ubuntu.

After installing 10.04 I experienced a GDM lockup a couple of times a day – the symptoms varied from the window management not reacting to left mouse clicks to a complete freeze of the Xserver. This bug has caused a lot of noise across distributions, for instance in 590109 and 538563. The symptoms are log messages such as


[mi] EQ overflowing. The server is probably stuck in an infinite loop.
...
Backtrace:
...
... /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so
...

in the :0… logfiles in /var/log/gdm when the problem occurs.

This is, however, not a kernel, XServer or GDM issue, but caused by a problem with the intel-linux driver. The problem is apparently fixed as of version 2:2.11.0-1ubuntu1 of the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver. Since this is not (yet) an update in the official distribution repo, I did the following to solve the issue:

1: Optional: Update to the latest stable kernel

Reason: IMO, upstream Intel drivers are usually build against the latest stable kernel

Goto http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.34-lucid/ and download the headers… _all.deb, headers-generic …..deb and linux-image… .deb for your platform (in most cases, i368). install the generic headers package, then the all headers package, then the image.

A word of warning: If you install this custom kernel you will not receive security updates for it from the automatic distribution updates.

2: Add the X Updates PPA to your sources.list

In a terminal, type:


sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

And add at the bottom of the file (if not already present):


deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main #X-Updates PPA
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates/ubuntu lucid main #X-Updates PPA

2.1: Trust the software packages from the x-updates PPA

sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com AF1CDFA9

3: Update the driver


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Reboot – the problem should be solved.

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Intel linux drivers and new kernel gfx support reach mature state

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Posted in: , , ubuntu.

The Linux Kernel and the XORG video rendering have been undergoing some significant improvements in the last year, with Intel’s linux open source team bringing in a lot of refactorings an architectural improvements.

I myself suffered from the lack of support for recent integrated intel gfx cards in notebooks and thus followed the excellent Intel Linux graphics performance guide using the bleeding-edge configuration, i.e. with the latest (non-stable) builds of the xorg / intel gfx drivers and the most recent kernels. However, this configuration was (not quite unexpected) somewhat unstable and had a lot of issues.

This phase is now over. I am happy to say that after upgrading to Kernel version 2.6.32 and the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver 2:2.9.0-1ubuntu2~xup~3 the graphics support is now fast, reliable and stable. Desktop effects are back working like a charm, also in a multi-monitor setup and with sending the computer to hibernation and so forth.

I am quite optimistic that this state might make it into the upcoming Ubuntu release (Karmic), thus eliminating a lot of frustration laptop users have been experiencing with their intel gfx cards.

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