Comment 266 for bug 541511

from
http://www.linux.com/community/forums?func=view&catid=25&id=5462
(1 Month, 1 Week ago)
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Basically, the Intel Linux developers have decided to screw with the
i915 gpu Linux kernel driver which used to work for the Intel 855GM or
Intel 85x graphics chips. They have decided to drop ums (user mode
setting) for the driver without providing a working kms (Kernel mode
setting) alternative.
So in short, if you have an Intel 85x graphics card (Extremely common on
slightly older Pentium M Centrino Notebooks) You have practically zero
chance of using any current distribution release which uses a current
version of the Linux kernel and be able to use any kind of working
xserver (Say for instance to use a desktop, kde sc, gnome, xfce, etc.)

The last working Fedora kernel version is :
2.6.31.1-56.fc12.i686

I believe that any of the 2.6.30.x kernels should work on any
distribution.
The recent Ubuntu LTS support release does not suffer from the problem
because the Ubuntu developers identified the issue and marked it as a
regression. Unfortunately, upstream are either not interested in fixing
or reverting the regression or are having no real luck fixing it.
(From some bug tracker hunting, it looks like a combination of the two
with the person involved in pushing the regression completely ignoring
the problem.)

This issue has been known for and was reported over six months ago now.
The developer who pushes the updates to the i915 driver was told that
the commits he was about to push were a regression but still he pushed
them and it was merged anyway.

The problem manifests itself as a complete lock up when the x server has
started or shortly after the xserver has started.
No magic sysrq key combination or ctrl + alt + backspace key combination
achieves any kind of escape from the lock up and the only solution is to
power down the machine manually by holding down the power button.

So if you do own a machine which contains an Intel 85x graphics chip,
you may as well either buy a new machine without Intel graphics to
replace it or run an old distribution on it (And hope that it is ever
fixed. Which seems pretty unlikely at the moment.)
I myself have one of these machines and have now learned the lesson the
hard way, to never again buy a machine which contains Intel graphics
hardware to try to use in conjunction with the Linux kernel. I advise
others to do the same.