Ubuntu: Open X Bugs, Nouveau In A "Funky State"

An update was provided today concerning the state of X.Org and related packages for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release.

Bryce Harrington of Canonical wrote a "State of X for quantal" message today on the ubuntu-x mailing list where he described the open bugs for the different open and closed-source graphics drivers plus the X.Org Server.

At the moment there are more than 100 open bugs that need attention in the X-related area of Ubuntu, but Bryce says this is quantitatively comparable to previous cycles. Differentiating this cycle though is that the Ubuntu 12.10 graphics stack will be back-ported to Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS as part of Canonical's plan to support the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS desktop edition longer than usual and as a result needing to introduce new/updated graphics support each step of the way.

Below are some of the highlights from Bryce's message.

- Nouveau seems to be a bit problematic right now. "Nouveau is in a rather funky state. We're seeing an unusually high number of reports about graphics corruption issues, and a fairly high proportion of server crashes and gpu lockups. I'm not really sure what the best strategy here is. I've heard upstream is in the midst of some significant rewriting of their code, and thus is more unstable than usual. Perhaps if someone could contact them they could give us some guidance on how to achieve better stability." The significant rewrite in part is the big changes in Linux 3.7.

- The Intel driver has the most bug reports, but in reality the total is much lower and the driver is in good shape.

- There's more X.Org Server crashes than usual.

- The NVIDIA binary driver is in good shape with less than one dozen bug reports, but the current 304.51 driver has one outstanding bug that needs to be addressed otherwise this latest release stands chances to be recalled from Ubuntu.

- There's not too many open Mesa bugs, but the bugs that are there tend to sit on the serious side. Some of them relate to fall-out from abandoning the Unity 2D desktop and now forcing users to run Unity over LLVMpipe.

- Most of the Catalyst/fglrx bug reports are invalid or need to be re-tested against the latest fglrx 9.00 build.