Comment 251 for bug 541511

They did blacklist KMS support for i8xx in an attempt to fix this, but that didn't work for everyone. I believe reverting to vesa was considered, but that has its own regressions including bad performance, lack of multi-monitor support, and often even a lack of support for a laptop's native resolution. And those regressions would be inflicted on all i8xx users, not just those that would encounter this bug.

So there were no good options. I'm sure if they knew 100% of i8xx users were affected, they'd switch to vesa. But there's no way to know that. It could be 5% and we wouldn't be able to tell the difference, since only affected users come here and report it.