Ah, ok. First a bit of background... ATI wrote a series of patches to add support for newer hardware, fix bugs in the radeon driver, and other enhancements. There are 9 patches altogether, as well as an all-in-one patch. This was sent to me and Kevin Martin by ATI. It was later sent to XFree86.org as well. I did not apply the patches at that point as I had other work to do. The code was eventually committed to XFree86 CVS by Kevin Martin a few weeks or a month after 4.3.0 was released. Of those patches, one is radeon-igp support, which is a no-brainer there is no reason not to include. It is totally harmless to any other chipset. There are various other similar harmless patches as well. One of the patches, is the DDC patch. Numerous laptop and other users have had tonnes of problems with stock XFree86 4.3.0 due to the BIOS based DDC probe it contains. This DDC patch fixes all known DDC related problems on these chips. All of these patches are now included in XFree86 CVS destined for the next XFree86 release. I have applied the all-in-one mega patch to XFree86 in rawhide to fix the various problems that the patch fixes. So people asking me to apply Alex's patch, are really asking me to dump rawhide XFree86, send development back 3 months and apply a single bugfix patch that fixes their one single problem while creating numerous problems for other radeon users that the existing XFree86 in rawhide fixes already. The patch isn't Alex's patch, it is written either by Michel Daenzer or ATI. That isn't going to happen. This all-in-one radeon patch is NOT going to be removed from rawhide XFree86 under any circumstance. The patches in rawhide XFree86 fix bugs. They may or may not introduce some problems as well, but that is beside the point really. Rawhide is not "official supported Red Hat errata packages", it is Red Hat internal development packages leading up to the next release of Red Hat Linux. What I'm being asked to do, is to back off a patch that aparently causes some people problems (not confirmed to be a bug yet however), in order to keep rawhide XFree86 stable for people who want to use it. That isn't the way rawhide works. Rawhide is development, do not use it if you can not accept problems happening. By all means, people should feel free to take stock RHL 9 XFree86, and mix and match patches they want/dont want from rawhide or off the net, and build their own rpm packages (preferably changing the Release: field to include something that wont be used by official Red Hat packages such as 2.you.0 or something). However, don't expect me to remove patches that fix numerous known bugs just because they cause some problems for a handful of users during our *development* cycle. These problems will be investigated, and if a real bug can be reproduced, it will be troubleshooted and hopefully fixed before the next OS release. Another option, is to download XFree86 CVS releases, and RPMify them or build from raw source (and mess up your system a bit), and test the CVS radeon driver. If the problem you experience in the rawhide rpms is present in CVS XFree86, then it is a CVS radeon driver bug, and you should report it to XFree86.org at http://bugs.xfree86.org so that someone can investigate it and hopefully fix it. In the mean time, while it is in my queue of bugs to investigate, it is not at the top of the queue, and wont be for some time, so do not use rawhide XFree86 at all in any way if this problem affects you and you must have a stable X server. Take the RHL 9 RPMs and add the one bug fix, rebuild them and use that. Rawhide, being developmental, is for people who want to beta test software, and can deal with it breaking from time to time, and possibly staying broken for unspecified periods of time as well. Do not use Rawhide in any production environment, as it is not supported officially by Red Hat, and makes your system unsupported. If none of that matters to you, by all means use rawhide, and report bugs. Please don't expect instant bug fixes though, as development is an ongoing process, not an instantaneous one. The current rawhide radeon driver very much fixes more bugs than it creates, so it stays. It will likely be updated before long as well. Hopefully I can break some more setups and get development really flowing. <grin> The intent of this email, is to explain that Rawhide is Red Hat development, and is intentionally not kept stable or reliable for external people. It is essentially a copy of the current daily internal Red Hat "collective conscious" hard disk if you will. Not an official stable bugfix source that is kept stable by any circumstance. Yes, I am repeating myself it seems. ;o) I like to be clear. ;o) -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ xfree86-list mailing list xfree86-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xfree86-list IRC: #xfree86 on irc.redhat.com
