I'm not the only one feeling Intel i830m video pain

Reader David Gurvich writes the following:

Hello,

I also have a system that uses the i830m chipset for graphics, the Thinkpad X30. All of the problems are related to kernel mode setting, particularly your current one. The new xorg video driver eliminates all user mode setting and is useless on systems that use i830. I've never gotten kernel mode setting to work with i830 systems and now that is the only option on new installs.

The only solution has been to install the 2.9.1 driver. That works for now but I am worried about future releases of Xorg that will not work with this driver. I suspect that I will need to maintain my own branch of Xorg. That will probably require a personal repository that includes older kernels, hal, and dbus along with any associated libraries.

My hope is that FreeBSD will have improved enough in user latency and other areas that I will be able to use that when the time comes. I have tried PC-BSD but the default install is too slow for daily use. I thought the problem might have been KDE4 but the issue persisted with a lightweight desktop environment. There are also some issues with hardware that don't exist on Linux. The one that springs to mind is my system locking up completely when the wireless card can't find a network on boot.

Thank you,

David Gurvich

Yeah, I'm not the only person hacked off about this. Here's what I wrote to David (knowing also that I'd run here as well):

Starting with Ubuntu Karmic and up through Lucid Alpha 2, and including Debian Sid (via Sidux 2009-04) at the end of 2009, I've been able to turn off kernel mode setting and get X to work.

So it was extremely disturbing to find that turning off kernel mode setting in Lucid Alpha 3 didn't work. Very disturbing.

I spent 6 months running OpenBSD 4.4 as my primary OS on this i830m laptop, and I didn't have any performance issues running both the stock Fvwm2 window manager as well as Xfce. The whole thing blew up when I upgraded to OpenBSD 4.5, and yes it was Xorg-related, but I've since tested OpenBSd 4.6 via the BSDanywhere and Jggimi live CDs, and Xorg is working again (can't remember if I needed an xorg.conf, but it must've either been easy to roll it together, or I'd have remembered.

The problems for me with OpenBSD are a) Flash 7 only (and only in Opera) b) too difficult to upgrade (which might be overcome if I can figure it out) c) hard to install Java (although I've done it and probably have the binary package I created in the process squirreled away on this hard drive) and d) no journaling filesystem, and on this creaky old hardware I lose power enough that all the fsck-ing I need to do in OpenBSD's FFS is relatively painful.

Not that I won't return to OpenBSD ...

FreeBSD is supposed to be much, much faster in every respect. There was a Phoronix test recently in which FreeBSD didn't blow Linux out of the proverbial water but did do OK. And it has at least Flash 9, precompiled Java packages, a much longer support cycle than OpenBSD, Ubuntu or Fedora.

If you tried PC-BSD but used, say, Fluxbox instead of KDE, I imagine the system would be much slower than if you installed vanilla FreeBSD and added the desktop environment and applications yourself. At least that's the theory anyway.

I don't know how FreeBSD uses memory, but I can tell you for sure that Linux and OpenBSD use it much differently. Linux seems to want to grab as much memory as possible and reserve it for whatever uses it thinks it's going to have. I don't know how this affects system performance - it could improve it, or it could hurt it. I'm really not sure.

But OpenBSD is very sparing on the memory it uses. I ran 768 MB for that six months in OpenBSD 4.4 and don't think I ever tapped the swap space even once. Now with 1 GB in both Ubuntu (Hardy, Karmic) and Debian (Lenny), the machine isn't relying heavily on swap but does use a little bit of it at least a little bit of the time. Again, I'm not sure which scenario is better for performance (or how FreeBSD factors into all of this), but it's at least a curiosity.

David, I don't know if you've tried Fedora 12 yet. I downloaded the image but haven't had a chance yet to burn it. Like you I'm looking for any bright spot in this whole mess. I don't know who to blame: the kernel team or Xorg (or the distros themselves). Intel i830m video can't be so obscure that nobody is suffering from this, and I can imagine hundreds or thousands of potential users being turned off when they can't get the live CD to boot to anything but a blank screen.

Before I forget to mention it, my experience with wireless on this platform with OpenBSD at least, is the opposite of what happened to you. Not only did wireless perform better with absolutely no crashes, I also was able to more easily configure my cheap NIC with a Ralink chipset in OpenBSD before I could get it working in Linux.

And crashes with wireless were precisely the reason I upgraded from Ubuntu Hardy to Karmic. I think a kernel update in Hardy eventually fixed the problem (I still have a Hardy i830m laptop running and can test this), and I wish I had stayed with it on the other i830m laptop. But networking in OpenBSD at least is a relative pleasure; networking and drivers are very important to the developers, so they get a lot of attention. However, you can't use the GUI tools like NetworkManager, I think, because of the vast differences in configuration between BSD and Linux (I could be wrong about this). Learning manual network configuration isn't the worst thing in the world.