With regards to enabling KMS, I was under the wrong impression that it was still enabled for the intel driver. Re-enabling it via i915.modeset=1 on the grub cmd line adverts the crash and X boots successfully. However DRI seems to have been deliberately disabled (see attached Xorg.conf), thus AIGLX instantiates the Mesa renderer. Also, playing any video in Totem or VLC player simply kills X. I don't know whether this is related to DRI, or to my update path from 9.10, where it used to work. I will try to find any information relevant on the logs to this last crash and append it later.
I've also noticed that there is a master bug discussing the blacklisting of KMS for i855 (bug #511001). I will quote this particular bug in it. ** Attachment added: "Xorg log for a KMS enabled boot" http://launchpadlibrarian.net/44942636/Xorg.0.log -- Xorg crashes with 855GM on boot: Failed to submit batchbuffer: Input/output error https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/565870 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