F10 intel driver: a few more tidbits


I was reading various web sites today when I came across an article on computerworld discussion the 5 best features of Linux 2.6.28.  On of these items is GEM, the graphics Execution Manager.  This is a new architecture of sorts that allows for better X performance (in a nutshell).  Why this is interesting comes from the discussion of how this feature was developed.  It started life in – you guessed it – the intel driver, specifically for the i915.  Somebody had to be first, I guess.

With this information we can now at least understand why the intel driver is causing so much grief to users upgrading to f10 (my blogs stats are leaning heavily toward the intel driver posts these days).  It doesn't explain why the driver doesn't work out of the box the way it used to with older kernels, but at least you know why there were changes (and what specifically got changed – the driver itself).  At least you should be able to fix the driver easily enough.

Note that some of the posts on other forums and blogs that I've read about this problem seem to point to i810 users having the most problem, and that (possibly) my solution isn't working for them.  Unfortunately I don't have an i810 to experiment with so I can't say if that works or not.  Feel free to comment here if you have an i810 chip and rebuilding the driver does or does not work for you.

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