Re: Include a backport of the Geode X driver in Debian Edu Wheezy? (Was: Second beta release (beta 1) of Debian Edu/Skolelinux based on Debian Wheezy)

2013/8/22 Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>

[Martin-Éric Racine]
> Hi Pere!
>
> You might wanna use the verson of the Geode X driver that is in
> Testing with this. It was meant to go into Wheezy but due to the
> impossibly long freeze, it didn't. It fixes several rendering issues
> that the current Geode driver mismanages.

This is better discussed on the mailing list
(debian-edu@lists.debian.org). Moving it there.

What will change if we use the version in Testing/Jessie instead of
the one in Wheezy?

It's mostly bugfixes, such as:

*   lx_exa: Improvements to negative srcX/Y PictOpSrc/Over operations

    Adds handling of negative srcX or srcY coordinates, which is used by gtk3
    GtkTrayIcon implementation via cairo for centering icons on top of the
    destination area.

*   lx_exa: Implement solid pictures support as source with a mask

    cairo-1.12 uses solid pictures instead of 1x1R pixmaps in glyph rendering
    paths, so accelerate it.
    In addition to acceleration, it avoids a bug in xserver-1.13.0 and earlier
    which causes visible misrendering for fallback path, making cairo-1.12 a
    viable and desired choice on GeodeLX systems.
    Quick benchmarking suggests a 4-12% win in cairo-traces.

*     lx_exa: Fix crash with solid fills on PictOpAdd operations

Everything else is just conditionals to make the driver build on various X releases and documentation cleanups.

I will not be able to maintain any more packages myself, so it would
at least depend on someone stepping up to security patch the package
for the life time of Debian Edu Wheezy.

This package has never received any security issue. It's a really stable (even though outdated) codebase. Nowadays, it's only ever updated to add conditionals to build against newer X servers.

Anyhow, the main point is that the driver currently in Stable is deficient and that affect operation of the OLPC XO-1 and of most Geode-based thin clients.

Martin-Éric

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