I believe I encountered the same problem on a Dell Inspiron 1440 laptop after upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic: rendering was unbearably slow, the error messages about DRM in Xorg.0.log were the same, and the /dev/dri directory did not exist.
Upgrading the kernel to linux-image-2.6.31-16-generic made the problem go away; performance was fine, /dev/dri/card0 showed up, and Xorg.0.log showed DRI2 was enabled. Please let me know if you'd like more information; I've still got the old kernel around, so I can get debugging info if needed. -- [i845] DRM fails to become master, results in (extremely) slow software rasterization https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/446641 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to xserver-xorg-video-intel in ubuntu. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
