Advice to lose (or minimize) computer freezes with intel card

[David]

Hello,

I suppose you are familiar with the topic, there are lots of bug reports (
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=intel+freeze,
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=629896) and forum threads. I
have a computer with card "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML
Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)".

I used to have no problems in 2007 (maybe because I did not use composition
yet?), but then I have been getting random and obscure freezes of the
computer. Ctrl+Alt+F1 or Alt+SysRq+REISUB do not work at all, the only
option is to shut down from the hardware. Random because they are
unpredictable, obscure because they leave no trace in the log of Xorg. It
happened with Debian, then I switched to Arch and they increased, then to
OpenSuse and now to Ubuntu. With the two latter distros, the frequency of
occurrences has dropped, but I still get them, and sometimes very close in
time (e.g., I had three yesterday within half an hour, they look as though
they had memory, but how if the computer has been "hardly restarted"?). I
never had the problem with computers having nvidia cards.

The computer is an acer aspire 5612 bought in 2007, of 32 bits. I am now
running the kernel 2.6.32-23-generic from Ubuntu, the version of
xserver-xorg is 1:7.5+5ubuntu1, the version of xserver-xorg-core is
2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.2, and the version of xserver-xorg-video-intel is
2:2.9.1-3ubuntu5. I use KDE (Kubuntu) with OpenGL enabled, bilinear (setting
trilinear looked to increase the occurrences of the freezes). I usually use
Firefox a lot.

Another annoying thing :-) is that, with Windows Vista, the composition is
smoother, quicker, and without any freezes :-( Is using Windows the only
solution so far? :-( :-( (please do not take it the wrong way, I am not
blaming Xorg's team, I am aware that Windows receives better driver support
from manufacturers).

Is there any way to lose or minimize such freezes? It does not have to be a
very deep answer (I am aware the bug is still open), but you can just tell
me your experience. You may also tell me whether you know any particular
distro (in 32 bits) where the number of occurrences be smaller.

Thank you,

David
PS. May I ask you to Cc to me any replies? Thank you.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/attachments/20100723/0fd0f3b7/attachment.html>