On 21/01/2012 00:50, Wojciech Zabolotny wrote:
I have stated, that if I disable the "desktop effects" the problematic "[drm:intel_prepare_page_flip] *ERROR* Prepared flip multiple times" do not overload my logs.
[...]
Anyway the problem does not appear on my other machines with Intel graphic chipsets (but newer than 865G).
I have an i855 and i've seen the "drm:intel_prepare_page_flip" error too when several months ago i've tried Mutter (thus graphic effects) under Gnome2: i had to return to Metacity. Some months ago Gnome2 was upgraded to Gnome3 and several graphic defects have arisen so, like you, i had to switch to another desktop environment (now Xfce, but not very happy). But problems remains with Firefox crashes on some flash-based sites, with random and sporadic screen corruption when watching videos, graphic corruptions with LibreOffice. All bugs that, looking around, are common and limited to owner of gen2 Intel chipsets.
The problem with gen2 hardware (830, 845, 855, 865) is that the situation is getting worse as the time goes by. Looks like these chipsets are, for various reasons, a pain in the ass for upstream and from what i understand they have choosen to relegate that old code apart from the modern one, removing from time to time problematic features that cause instabilities and to concentrate on the more modern and documented graphics hardware. For our gen2 hardware the soon to be released mesa 8 seems to have removed other features with the effect that, as someone said on mesa ml, for these chipset the driver will be nearly equal to the unaccelerated vesa one.
For the record yesterday i've given a try to PCBSD 9.0 and with the default installer when X started i got a blank screen: i had to reboot to select vesa mode, to get X working. So these chipsets seems to cause pain also to other OSes.
It is with great sadness that i suggest you to start saving some money, then change your hardware to something more recent, for example a sandy bridge processor that seems to be very well supported. It will save you time and headache. It's a pity, because our hardware is not so old and its computational power is yet suitable for many tasks, but this is what i've realized by experience.
Cesare.