Intel 82845G woes

[ampharos]

Yup, it's that chipset again.Awfully grumpy for an Intel chipset!

Unlike other people; I can actually use the PC fine until I start Icedove while using Iceweasel or starting Synaptic; this causes the GPU to hang.I can move the cursor; and apps still respond; (I closed Icedove, and an htop session via SSH confirms it) just that the screen doesn't repaint except for the cursor and I can switch to a VT fine. When switching back, I get a kernel error saying that the GPU hung, and switches to a black screen with the X cursor on it.

I've heard it may be an out of RAM problem, because the thing has only 256 MB RAM. Could this help? (I SSH'd and there still is quite a bit of leg room)

Debian squeeze, 2.6.32, 400 MB Swap, and a Pentium 4 Celeron.

[ampharos]

Bumping with info; there's a second erro after the GPU hang saying a render error has occured, EIR with a 0x error code of all 0s.

[ampharos]

bump, this is getting insan. i have to reboot 5 times a day because of this bs.

[dtl131]

What driver are you using (post your /var/log/Xorg.0.log if unsure) ? The intel driver is infamous for hanging on the GPU's, which is why Ubuntu uses the generic fbdev or vesa driver as default on these chipsets ever since Lucid.

[ampharos]

Code: Select all

(II) LoadModule: "intel"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so


And a snippet of lspci:

Code: Select all

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)


It seems to help if I use less intensive things; for example, use mobile versions of sites.

[dtl131]

You're using the intel driver, which is known to hang on i8xx chips.Your choice: switch to vesa driver or live with the hangs and rebooting.

[ampharos]

The point being, why is this crashing the GPU? I can scrape the bottom barrel for older and/or worse chipsets that work fine. Even the crap shipped by SiS works great on another PC. Windows even worked fine, albeit poorly as it possibly can go...

Also, would a kernel change help, or a Xorg upgrade from Backports?

[dtl131]

It crashes because of the KMS and other GEM code that benefits owners of newer intel chips. An Intel dev started working on a UMS driver for legacy intel hardware, but IIRC it never went anywhere: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... &px=ODQzMQ

You can try some other hacks like turning off KMS or running older versions of the intel driver and/or kernel. https://wiki.kubuntu.org/X/Bugs/Lucidi8xxFreezes