- Michael J. Hammel - https://www.graphics-muse.org/wp -

F10 and xorg intel driver: solved

My problems with the intel driver [1] provided in the f10 [2] distribution have been resolved.  I had to compile the driver [3] manually, along with the libdrm prerequisite, but it was rather painless and surprisingly easy to accomplish.  mythtv [4] is now happily serving up live tv [5] and videos on my laptop [6] monitor while I work on the external monitor.  No blur, no jumpiness.  Just like it was in f9 [7].

The fix did not require the latest kernel [8] nor [9] the latest xorg [10] server release.  Instead, I downloaded the intel driver [11] and libdrm from the git repository as explained on the IntelLinuxGraphics.org [12] web site.  To make life easier for anyone else with this problem on F10, here is exactly what I did.

First you need to download, build and install the libdrm module:

This installs the updated libdrm under /usr/local so you don't have to worry about trashing the current rpm [16] packages which makes it easy to do package updates later without impacting this fix.

Next, download, build and install the driver.  This requires telling the build about the just installed libdrm.  This is done by specifying the location of the new libdrm in the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable.

Now the driver is built and installed out of the way of the F10 packages.  All that's left is to tell the server where to pick up the new driver.  This is done by adding the following line to the start (before other ModulePath entries) of the Files section of the xorg.conf file:

ModulePath “/usr/local/xorg/lib/xorg/modules/”

It's important that this be the first ModulePath entry in the Files section.  You can have more than one ModulePath in this section and they are all appended in order.  This order is also the order searched for driver (and other) modules.  So having this path first tells the server to look in our new driver directory first for the intel driver.

With this done, you can now uncomment the NoAccel option you previously had added to allow the driver to work at all with dual monitors [18].  You can take a look at my updated xorg.conf [19] to get an idea of how I set my system up to work with xrandr [20], my laptop LCD and an external monitor connected to the vga port [21] on the laptop.

Kudos to both the Xorg team and the LinuxIntelGraphics team for making this process far easier than I had originally expected it to be.  I was able to do it all over a lunch hour today, after having eaten lunch at home.