Problem with Xorg / XFree86-DRI ; who to blame?

[Dan Nicholson]

On Jan 8, 2008 11:56 PM, Rob <spamrefuse at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My OS is an up-to-date version of Fedora 7 on a Intel based PC.
>
> I use a particular academic/scientific video rendering software VMD
> ( http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/ ).
> This software uses GLX/Mesa heavily.
>
> My day-to-day window manager is XFCE. When I use VMD, it immediately
> freezes keyboard/mouse on my console as soon as any video rendering
> activity occurs. The typical error message in /var/log/messages is:
>
>     kernel: [drm:i915_wait_irq] *ERROR* i915_wait_irq: EBUSY --
>                rec: 147447 emitted: 147473

It would appear that the kernel DRM driver for Intel is getting messed
up. I don't know enough about the interactions between Xorg/DRI/DRM to
say if the problem is in the kernel driver or in something using it in
a faulty way, but my bet is that this is the DRM module's fault (it
should at least handle the errors more gracefully and not lock up).

> Is there anybody who knows about this matter and can help me
> understand what's going on?
> I'd like to report this problem somewhere, but who is to be blamed?
>   Xorg ?
>   Fedora ?
>   XFree86-DRI ?

I would report the problem to Fedora. FC7 is a bit old relative to
upstream, so they'd probably know if there are patches they can
backport for the Intel DRM driver. The people here probably can't help
unless you jump onto more recent versions of the Xorg/DRI/DRM chain.

--
Dan