Nasty Sparc Xorg bug fixed

A long living Xorg bug has finally been fixed : on my Ultra-10, Xorg crashes the system when starting up. The code in Xorg was trying to mimmick VGA routing by disabling I/O responses behind the Simba PCI controller. Unfortunately, doing this also happens to disable access to the IDE controller I/O registers, thus crashing the system. No console messages because the console has been put into framebuffer mode by the X server already.

This took a painfully long time to track down and debug. Luckily, once fixed, the code got blindingly fast implemented in the Debian packages, and the fix is now available in xserver-xorg-core-1.1.1-10. No luck however in SparcUbuntu, cause the package isn't yet available, and the Debian xserver-xorg-core package cannot be installed on Ubuntu, because of conflict issues. However, by unpacking the deb file, one can simply copy the Xorg binary to /usr/bin, which fixes also the problem.

kristof Thu, 12/07/2006 - 07:50

Some more info about this bug and how to resolve it :

In the xorg log this is the error displayed before the crash :

xf86MapPciMem: Could not mmap PCI memory
Inappropiate ioctl for device

You can unpack .deb files with the 'ar' command :
ar x mypackage.deb

This will give you 2 files : data.tar.gz and control.tar.gz. Unzipping the data file will present you a tree with all files from the package included.

kingcharles1666 Mon, 03/19/2007 - 19:06

It seems the bug is back....
I tried the experimental version of debian with a feisty install of ubuntu but the problem is again there. (x 7.2)