Intel Linux Graphics On Ubuntu Still Flaky

[ Thanks to Michael Larabel for this link. ]

"Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 ships with a development snapshot of the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, the GNOME 2.27.4 desktop, X Server 1.6.2 RC1, xf86-video-intel 2.8.0, and Mesa 7.5. This is in contrast to Ubuntu 9.04 with its Linux 2.6.28 kernel, GNOME 2.26.1, X Server 1.6.0, xf86-video-intel 2.6.3, and Mesa 7.4. It is the xf86-video-intel 2.8.0 driver that completely kills EXA and DRI1 in favor of using the EXA-derived UXA acceleration architecture that leverages the Graphics Execution Manager. DRI2, of course, is what replaces DRI1. With eliminating these older code paths, Intel cut down on the amount of work they are responsible for and they hope it reduced their regression count. Mesa 7.5 is the first release to introduce Gallium3D, but Ubuntu currently does not enable any components with this new graphics driver architecture.

"For this article we ran a set of graphics benchmarks (using the Phoronix Test Suite) with an ASRock G43Twins-FullHD that offers an integrated Intel G43 graphics processor. Running with this system was a dual-core Intel Celeron E1400 that was overclocked to 2.50GHz, 1GB of DDR2 memory, and a 300GB Seagate ST3300622AS hard drive. We compared the results between clean installations of Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 (both versions were the x86_64 builds) and with the "out of the box" settings. EXA was the default 2D acceleration in Ubuntu Jaunty while Ubuntu Karmic is using UXA."

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