(Crowd funded) fix for SiS 671/771 video cards

[Connor Behan]

On 06/05/13 10:25 AM, pander at users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Since a few months the driver for SiS 671/771 video cards is no longer
> working in main stream distributions such as Ubuntu. This is affecting
> many users and I would like to ask the development community of Xorg who
> would like to fix this issue.
>
> For the details please see these bug reports:
>   https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15190
> and:
>  https://bugs.launchpad.net/debian/+source/xserver-xorg-video-sis/+bug/301958
>
> Since the number of users waiting for a fix is in the thousands, I am sure
> that some sort of crowd funding such as:
>   https://www.catincan.com/proposal/altdrag/altdrag-10
> might be possible.
>
> I am more than happy to make a financial contribution in order to not
> having to write off some still good hardware. I am sure many others are
> willing to chip in. Who would be interested in taking this on?
>
> Regards,
>
> Pander
>
Those bug reports started in 2008 and seem to just track the stability
of the SiS driver in general. Nowhere do I see a description about the
specific problem that has arisen in 2013 with the proper information
(terminal output, dmesg output, lspci output, xorg.conf file, backtrace,
etc). As suggested on the Launchpad bug report, I would try compiling
xf86-video-sisimedia with the Archlinux patches applied:
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk?h=packages/xf86-video-sisimedia
They have put a large amount of effort into keeping this driver working
and have updated the patches in 2013.

If those still don't work, get your hands dirty... if any particular
strings appear in error messages, find those strings in the source and
figure out what function is failing. Then compare the execution of the
broken copy to the last working copy you remembered. If the API of some
dependency changed, use git bisect to repeatedly compile the kernel or
the Xserver until you find the exact line of code in the dependency that
made the difference. Hacking the driver might sound hard, but it's not
so hard that you have to pay someone to do it.

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