ubuntu kernel, i915: is there a patch?
 

Hi all,

I'm right now in a process of encouraging people (mostly people I know, but also others) to use Linux. For this reason I'm trying out various distributions to get a basic idea of which distro to recommend to whom. The other day I installed Ubuntu - a fine distro indeed. One thing happily surprised me, though; I use a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook P7010, which has a known problem of losing Direct Rendering after a resume from suspend-to-ram. Under Ubuntu. running the stock kernel, I did not have this problem and I'm guessing the ubuntu devs have written some kind of a kernel patch (though I might be wrong and this has only to do with the xorg drivers). The relevant module is the i915 for the Intel 855GM chipset.

Does anyone have any idea of how Ubuntu handles this? If there's a kernel patch involved, could someone please point me to it and/or any forum discussing it?

Thanks a lot.

You might find what you're looking for on the Ubuntu forums:

http://ubuntuforums.org/index.php

Or if a search fails to turn up what you're after, you can always register for free and post a question in the appropriate place....

Thanks. I've been looking in the Ubuntu forums, but haven't found anything relevant to my question. I decided not to register since I'm not really an Ubuntu-user, and I thought some of the ubuntu people might be hanging out here... But yeah, I might just give that a shot :)

Re-reading your initial post reminded me of something that I think happened shortly after I went to Ubuntu from Mandrake/Mandriva Linux. I use direct rendering, too, on my elderly (by Internet/computer standards) desktop system with an ATI Rage 128 graphics board. Once, and maybe twice, I found that direct rendering had been mysteriously disabled. I know with certainty that I didn't do it! I had to go back into my xorg.conf file and re-enable it.

At least this gives a hint that the problem may not be hardware-specific. But I'm sorry to say I have no idea what program or process was responsible for the disabling.

The way I found out about it being disabled was that OpenOffice.org, which uses direct rendering to speed up its display operations, complained about it when I opened it up, and said it was reverting to slower indirect rendering.