[Nix-dev] Xorg and i915 gpu driver

[Tony White]

Hi all,
I've been wanting to load NixOS trunk back onto my laptop for a while
now but it's a machine with an Intel 855GM cpu and there are several
bugs in the Linux kernel i915 gpu driver and libdrm for it. [i855GM]
gtt chipset flush is not cache coherent
(http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27187) Is the main one
and locks up the kernel completely on every Linux distribution I've
tried. Including NixOS.
Having experienced the problem for six months, the only distribution I
could get working on the machine with a desktop, without it crashing a
lot, was Fedora 12 using a kernel from rawhide. It kind of sucks for
me because I only use Linux right now on the machine.
After some bothering on the freedesktop bugzilla, it turns out that
they may have fixed the issue and I am really keen to test it.
It will mean I can install NixOs and it won't randomly crash when I launch KDE.
To test what apparently works, I'm going to need :
Xorg Xserver 1.8 -
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg-announce/2010-April/001289.html
Latest libdrm (libdrm-2.4.20) ( See attached
nix/nixpkgs/trunk/pkgs/development/libraries/libdrm/default.nix
(Untested.) )
Linux kernel 2.6.34-rc3 or higher
And these two patches :
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=34595
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=34824

So my question is :
Has anyone managed to build xserver 1.8 on NixOS? Is it in stdenv updates?
I've seen yury's thread about the kernel firmware loader change, so I
know about that. I'm cool with modifying a kernel expression on NixOS
and adding patches until the patches go upstream, done it before. I've
got a libdrm expression attached (Which is untested) So I just really
need the xserver but in trunk it's xorg-server-1.7.5.

I just don't want to go trudging through the xorg expression and if it
doesn't work, waste time trying something that I doubt I could fix if
it was broken.

Anyone know/tried it?

Thanks,
Tony
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