Well, this week I tried to install Gentoo on a friend’s Lenovo laptop, replacing his Ubuntu. All went well (Recompiled with glibc 2.5-r1, etc.). Xorg compiled fine too. But while starting, it gives this cryptic error and cops out:
(EE) I810: unknown type(0xffffffff)=0xff
I searched high and low on googlespace for the answer. The only satisfactory solution (sort of) was the one I got from Greg’s page here. He talks of enabling VM86 in the kernel. Unfortunately in the latest kernel, there’s no option that I can find for VM86. Does anyone know why VM86 was dropped in 2.6.19? Next time, I catch hold of his laptop, I’ll install 2.6.18 and see what comes of it.
thinkblobs 
VM86 is still in 2.6.19 but the option is kind of buried.
The VM86 option is found under “Processor Type and Features” but it depends on “Configure standard kernel features (for small systems)” under “General setup”
I was able to located VM86 using the search feature when doing `make menuconfig`. The ‘/’ brings up a search dialog that told me vm86 was under “processor type and features” and depended on “EMBEDDED”. I then searched for “EMBEDDED” and could them enable vm86.
I haven’t contacted the i810 xorg driver developers but it would be very helpful if they put a log message that pointed people towards vm86.
Greg
Thanks, Greg!
It seems that it was some other problem. CONFIG_VM86 was enabled in my friend’s kernel configuration. He tweaked around the kernel configuration and did something to make it all right.
All’s well that ends well!
I had the same problem. I set CONFIG_VM86=y in .config, recompiled the kernel, and rebooted. Xorg started working fine after that, so, at least in my case, this was the missing piece of the puzzle.
Worked for me as well except I edited the .config file in order to find CONFIG_VM86 (which, by the way, was under a comment about FTAPE.)
Nice hint about the search in make menuconfig. Somehow I never knew it did that, which is how I got in the habit of editing the .config file in the first place 🙂