Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77381
i810 XFree 4.2 driver doesn't work properly on Intel 845GEBV2
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:11 EDT
Description of Problem: When redhat 8.0 installs it detects the built in video card, an i810 variant. However something is awry with this version of the i810 and it causes weird font behavior under KDE and memory leaks under gnome. Switching to fbdev is a viable work around. http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/D845GEBV2/ Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-4.2.0-72 How Reproducible: simple do a default install of redhat 8.0 on this motherboard. Steps to Reproduce: 1. install redhat 8.0 2. login 3. start a terminal and watch the memory get eaten Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information:
This video hardware is unsupported.
See bug duplicate for details. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 74974 ***
that's really sad since this is a brand new board, ah well, wouldn't it be easier to fix redhat-config-xfree86 or Xconfigurator to simply detect this board and pick fbdev ?
Yes, it is unfortunate that XFree86 4.2.x does not support this hardware, however that's sadly the way it is currently. One should always first find out what hardware is officially supported prior to making a hardware purchase. No, it is not easier to 'fix' redhat-config-xfree86 to use fbdev. It is intentional that it does not support fbdev. Hardware that does not have a native video driver in XFree86 is unsupported by Red Hat. During beta testing, we default known unsupported hardware to using the "vesa" driver, and if that happens to work for some people and no major bug reports come back, then we leave the given unsupported hardware defaulting to "vesa", however it is still unsupported completely by us, and only provided as a convenience to users who would otherwise have no working video at all. There are no plans to add code to the config tools for handling fbdev, at this time, and no plans to support X using fbdev. XFree86 will generally work with fbdev assuming it is configured correctly, however that is merely "provided" for convenience as well, and not supported. Every feature that is implemented requires developer time to do so, and then to debug, receive bug reports, and fix them. Doing so would be "supporting" something that we straight out state we do not officially support. i845 will be supported in the next release of Red Hat Linux, and there is experimental (but currently broken) support in rawhide.