[elrepo] el6 and intel sandy bridge graphics

[Matt Garman]

Hi,

This is in response to the Jan 2 post "Announcement: Updated/New EL6
xorg-x11-drv-intel, libdrm, mesa, vaapi, development, utilities, and
dependencies - Testing Release" [1].

I'm running CentOS 6, and have been eagerly awaiting updated Sandy
Bridge graphics drivers for use in a media PC running MythTV.

Anyway, I installed all the packages mentioned in the elrepo post.  I
haven't had any stability problems.  I had my system playing back
video for a whole day (roughly 16 hours).  I wasn't watching it, but
was running some basic monitoring tools.  No crashes, lockups or any
nasty stuff like that.

Now, actually watching stuff: I haven't had time to watch a whole lot,
but there is some light tearing on some videos.  If you do a web
search for a phrase like "linux sandy bridge tearing", you'll get a
*lot* of info.  My suspicion is that there's a problem not related to
the elrepo packaging.

Also, someone else appears to have similar goals as me: see this[2]
post on the mythtv-users mailing list.  He's running Gentoo, but has
similar results as me.  When I configure MythTV to render using
opengl, attempting to play any videos results in an instant MythTV
crash.  However, if I use mplayer with -vo gl (or even gl2), the video
plays perfectly.  That to me suggests a mythtv issue, but that post
makes mention of the freedesktop.org guys making a patch for mesa.  I
did a little searching, but wasn't able to find the patch (but maybe I
missed it).

Anyway, just wanted to give some feedback of using the "testing"
packages related to Sandy Bridge graphics.

[1] http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2012-January/000997.html

[2] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/501031