resolving X Server crashes on SPARC (bugs #488669 and #500358)

[Gaudenz Steinlin <gaudenz@debian.org>]

Hi

Joss assigned me these two bugs[1] (currently merged) for the bug sprint[2]. As
I lack proper SPARC hardware to investigate this myself, I need your help.

The two bugs are about X Server Crashes on SPARCs with PCI ATI Mach64 cards. The
most probable cause of the crash is an incompatible kernel change introduced with
kernel 2.6.26. For #500358 I'm quite sure that it' caused by the kernel change. 
For #488669 I'm not quite sure if it's really the same bug, because the original
reporter ran kernel 2.6.24 which predates the kernel change. For more information 
about the kernel change see: http://marc.info/?t=121247857800001&r=1&w=2

If the crash is really caused by the kernel change, the real bug is in the X server.
But to fix it, we would have to upgrade to xserver-xorg-core 1.5. I don't think that
this is really an option. The other options would be to revert the kernel change or
to release with a non-working X server for some SPARC machines. Unless of course we
find someone willing and able to fix the X server in lenny to work with the kernel 
change. A simple backport of the changes in 1.5 doesn't seem to be possible.

I would like you to test two things:
1. Install the kernel package from http://people.debian.org/~gaudenz/sparc
   and test if this fixes the problem. This is the same kernel as currently 
   in unstable with the problematic change removed. Please also test this 
   kernel if you are not affected by the change to see if the removal of the 
   problematic change has any ill side effects.
2. Install xserver-xorg-core and xserver-xorg-video-mach64 from experimental
   and run this on a kernel 2.6.26 or later without removing the change. This 
   should also fix the problem.

Thanks for you help

Gaudenz

Please CC me on any replies to the mailinglists.

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/488669
    http://bugs.debian.org/500358
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/BugSprint
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