Intel GMA X4500HD woes (Intel G45 Chipset)

[talz13]

Install 8.10 Alpha 5 and it will work.

http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/intrepid/alpha5

Hmmm... I guess I'll have to do that when the release version comes out!

[fusionisthefuture]

im really interested in buying the asus p5q-em with this chipset, and the x4500HD, which i intend to use. ive pretty much convinced myself i cant have anything else, but im not going to actually spend the money on it till i hear some news about its linux driver support. if anyone could do a mini review and list their system specs id be very grateful. im basically interested in cpu usage during 1080p playback in mythtv.

[Croccydile]

im really interested in buying the asus p5q-em with this chipset, and the x4500HD, which i intend to use. ive pretty much convinced myself i cant have anything else, but im not going to actually spend the money on it till i hear some news about its linux driver support. if anyone could do a mini review and list their system specs id be very grateful. im basically interested in cpu usage during 1080p playback in mythtv.

I'm only gathering from what I've read about the X4500 driver, that HD acceleration seems to depend on the proper alignment of the sun, the moon and the stars to work properly. At least from reading reports about the device under Windows and how you need Vista + HDCP + Cyberlink to get the benefit of the HD acceleration from the chipset.

I'm hoping im incorrect about this. I can't afford to run an unstable release right now on the system I have in question and will have to wait for stable to try out also.

[fusionisthefuture]

*****... not the sun and moon bug

[sbergman27]

if anyone could do a mini review and list their system specs id be very grateful.

Mini-review:

In my experience with the G43 chipset with X4500 video, on my Gigabyte EG43M-S2H, with a fully updated Intrepid Ibex Alpha 5, X crashes with a backtrace immediately upon start up:

Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x65) [0x481145]
1: /lib/libc.so.6 [0x7f4846d00120]
2: X [0x4a73ad]
3: X(xf86InitialConfiguration+0x1309) [0x4aaef9]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so [0x7f484572089b]
5: X(InitOutput+0x969) [0x46a369]
6: X(main+0x286) [0x4335d6]
7: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x7f4846ceb466]
8: X [0x432b89]
Saw signal 11. Server aborting.
Aborted

Hardy won't even install because the G43 sata driver is too new. The vesa driver sort of works, but all widescreen modes are completely corrupted. The G43/X4500 hasn't been much fun yet.

[fusionisthefuture]

is the difference between that and the G45 the HD on the end of the x4500HD?, the southbridge, or what?

[talz13]

Mini-review:

In my experience with the G43 chipset with X4500 video, on my Gigabyte EG43M-S2H, with a fully updated Intrepid Ibex Alpha 5, X crashes with a backtrace immediately upon start up:

Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x65) [0x481145]
1: /lib/libc.so.6 [0x7f4846d00120]
2: X [0x4a73ad]
3: X(xf86InitialConfiguration+0x1309) [0x4aaef9]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so [0x7f484572089b]
5: X(InitOutput+0x969) [0x46a369]
6: X(main+0x286) [0x4335d6]
7: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x7f4846ceb466]
8: X [0x432b89]
Saw signal 11. Server aborting.
Aborted

Hardy won't even install because the G43 sata driver is too new. The vesa driver sort of works, but all widescreen modes are completely corrupted. The G43/X4500 hasn't been much fun yet.

It does, in fact install on this board, I just had to play with the sata settings in the bios to get it to recognize my sata dvd drive. The graphics drivers are NOT good yet (hopefully it'll work well with 8.10 like was mentioned above), so I'm stuck on 1280x1024 on my 1680x1050 monitor for the time being...

[jackocleebrown]

Just installed Intrepid Alpha 5 64bit on HP 6730b laptop with GE45 chipset and X4500MHD. Seems to work pretty well now. Initially had a little trouble with it not waking up from sleep but that seems to be fixed with latest updates. Audio not working at the moment but not sure if this is hardware or pulseaudio config issues. Video working pretty well, including direct rendering, although it is hard to tell how fast it is going because it seems to be syncd to the screen refresh rate so everything reports 60fps irrespective of how hard it is to render. Compiz working much smoother than on my previous laptop with ATI pcie x600 radeon. Now that xorg.conf has disappeared I am not sure how to specify options for the intel driver!

I did manage to boot to the Hardy live CD and partition the disc too before moving on the Intrepid 64bit alpha incidentally.

Looking forward to alpha 6!

Jack.

[hippolyte]

It does, in fact install on this board, I just had to play with the sata settings in the bios to get it to recognize my sata dvd drive. The graphics drivers are NOT good yet (hopefully it'll work well with 8.10 like was mentioned above), so I'm stuck on 1280x1024 on my 1680x1050 monitor for the time being...

You might be able to get the native resolution by adding a modeline manually in xorg.conf. Well ... the funny thing is that, xorg.conf is gone on several Linux distros, including Ubuntu, I guess. You might have to run xorg -configure (of course as root!) to get a suitable one. It should output something in /root/xorg.conf.new that you might be able to use. Copy that file to /etc/X11/xorg.conf. DON'T do that if you already have that file and if it doesn't look silly or empty.

Here's what I do on Unix BSD when I have to replace a monitor and the driver doesn't pick the correct resolution. The method should work on Linux as well.

1) in the device section, the one describing your graphic card/graphic chipset, comment out the Driver line and add that one instead :
Driver "vesa"

2) then start Xorg with "startx" (forgot to mention that you have to do all that in the console, not in X !)

3) Exit X and take a look of /var/log/Xorg.0.log
Does it contain lines like those :
(II) VESA(0): Modeline "1680x1050"x0.0 119.00 1680 1728 1760 1840 1050 1053 1059 1080 +hsync -vsync (64.7 kHz)
(II) VESA(0): Modeline "1680x1050"x0.0 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync (65.3 kHz)

If so, pick one and write it in a Modes section that you will have to create in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Mine looks like that for the 22'' LG Flatron I just bought. Yours will look different since we don't have the same monitor :

Section "Modes"
Identifier "Modes[widescreen]"
Modeline "1680x1050" 146.25 1680 1784 1960 2240 1050 1053 1059 1089 -hsync +vsync
EndSection

4) Now, add the following line to the monitor section which describes your monitor :
UseModes "Modes[widescreen]"
Here's how my monitor section looks like :

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "LG W2242TQ"
ModelName "LG W2242TQ"
HorizSync 30-83
Option "DPMS"
VendorName "LG"
VertRefresh 56-75
UseModes "Modes[widescreen]"
EndSection

5) Now you might have to change the Defaultdepth and display subsection of your screen section into something like that ( Identifier, Device and Monitor should match your system, not mine!):

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen DefaultScreen"
Device "Geforce 6150"
Monitor "LG W2242TQ"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 15
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x7680" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x7680" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x7680" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 32
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x7680" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
SubSection "Display"
Depth 8
Modes "1680x1050" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x7680" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection

It will start X with a 24-bit color depth and first try 1680x1050, then 1280x1024, etc in that order.

I had to do that for the Geforce chipset on that mainboard because the nv driver sucks (and we don't use proprietary nvidia drivers on a free and secure system like OpenBSD). But sometimes, a single entry like that one will enforce the 1680x1050 resolution at 60Hz without the need of modelines:

Modes "1680x1050_60.00"

6) Almost done ... Before starting X, get rid of the Driver "vesa" line and uncomment your driver line.

This is just a generic solution to an Xorg problem, not Ubuntu and not even Linux specific. I cannot guaranty that you will succed and I'm not responsible if you fry your monitor. Getting things to work the hard way might not be in the Ubuntu philosophie. Hope it helps however ...

[rstuart4133]

I have a Gigabyte Gigabyte GA-EG45M-DS2H motherboard, and am running Debian Lenny AMD64 on it with a 6600 (quad core). Obviously, I am not running Ubuntu, but if you use the same versions of the packages as I do, you will probably get the same results.

I first tried the 2.6.24 i386 kernel (linux-image-2.6.26-i386_2.6.24). As others have noted, the Realtek ethernet chip is very iffy in 2.6.24 and in my case the text console had the top line clipped. These problems were not unexpected, as 2.6.24 doesn't support the G45 chipset.

I then decided to try the 64 bit kernel, so I reformatted and reinstalled. The installation media again had 2.6.24 (linux-image-2.6.26-amd64_2.6.24) on it, but oddly all aforementioned issues were gone. Anyway, installation I upgraded to the current Debian Lenny kernel 2.6.26 (linux-image-2.6.26-amd64_2.6.26) and haven't had an issue since. This is what I would expect, as support for the G45 chipset was only added to the kernel in 2.6.26. I don't use hardware RAID, and strong suggest none of you do either. Use the kernels software RAID instead, and it often faster (particularly the RAID5 variants), and is always more reliable than hardware RAID. (This comment doesn't apply if you have spent more on your RAID controller than you have on your house, of course. But since we are talking about the onboard RAID controller of a $100 motherboard that isn't the case here.)

Lenny comes with xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.3.2, which I didn't expect to work on the G45. I didn't actually check. 2.4.0 is supposed to work, but I have seen reports that it crashes the kernel so I wasn't keen to try it. The current upstream version is 2.4.2. If has 26k lines of diffs compared to 2.3.2, so it looks like work had continued on it apace. So I installed xserver-xorg-intel_2.4.2 from Debian experimental. Joy! It just worked through HDMI, at 1920x1080p. The only issue is something smart-**** piece of software seems to of decided I am viewing everything on a TV, and upscaled the fonts to humongous++, so you get this weird effect of tiny icons and huge letters. But that isn't a driver problem. Someone, higher up in the driver chain somewhere is decided to be "Helpful". I will track it down one day.

It became apparent later the driver is not completely stable. About every one in 10 times you start the X server the machine freezes. But is definitely usable. Another issue is I get the occasional screen flicker, but I put that down to pushing the HDMI cable right to its limit. HDMI is rated for 1920x1080p at 3m, which is what I am using it at. I suspect if I buy a 1m HDMI cable the problem will go away. (Be sure to use a cable that conforms to HDMI 1.3. I have seen stores claiming to stock 5m HDMI cables for $12 or so. Since such a thing does not exist at any price what they are actually selling is a box with 5m and HDMI on the side, containing a piece of junk. HDMI cables aren't expensive - $20..$30, but they aren't dirt cheap either.)

There are two outstanding issues as far as I am concerned. Firstly, I don't know how to access the BluRay acceleration. Is it supported? Does it just work? Do I have to do something? Its likely exposed via a video4linux driver, but there are no v4l devices seen by 2.6.26. I seen posts elsewhere that say its unlikely to be ever supported. That may be the case, as there is probably some tie-in with HDCP. Sad, but if my 6600 CPU can handle realtime BluRay decoding, it probably doesn't matter. As as I have to crack the AACS anyway, then I can do the transcoding at the same time so it is probably irrelevant.

Secondly, how does one push audio through HDMI? The impression I get it is requires ALSA drivers for the chipset, which don't exist, even in the as yet unreleased 2.6.27. Again not good. But the analogue sound will be just fine for now. Unlike the BluRay decoding issue, this will almost certainly be fixed in time.

The bottom line is isn't perfect, as in it doesn't work as well as it does under Windows. Given the hurdles HDCP puts in the way that may always be the case. But if you know what you are doing you can make it work well enough now if for a usable HTPC. I imagine in a 2009 release of Ubuntu it will come as close as it can to "Just Working". So don't give up hope.

Here is a link with a bit more info:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1057866