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

[Pander]

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On 05/06/2013 10:36 PM, Connor Behan wrote:
> 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.
> 

My experience with building drivers for Xorg is relatively small. As I
recall, this one compiles but crashed Xorg and I don't know exactly
what to submit exactly. It is better if the people working on that
driver or other Xorg experts give it a try and write a proper analysis
of the specific work that needs to be done (probably restoring support
that has been removed but that might not be trivial).

> 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.
> 

Well, I don't mind getting my hands dirty but I am already involved in
too many other open source project myself at the moment. With so many
users of this hardware out there and people getting used to chipping
in for applications or features via small donations such as Google
Play for Android, I think it is a nice way to show appreciation for
their efforts. But if someone would like to start working on it
nevertheless-simply because to support users with this kind of
hardware-that is also fine.

> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ 
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> http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel Info:
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> 

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