is acceleration for the XFCE XFWM compositor possible?

[sarunoatama]

I can't seem to get good performance with the XFWM compositor turned on. If I use the open source drivers, the performance is great (but other things keep me from using it). From what I understand XFWM uses EXA which the open source drivers accelerate and the proprietary drivers are supposed to accelerate via textured2d and/or texturedxrender options. If I enable textured2d, it doesn't seem to help at all. If I enable textured2d and texturedxrender, X crashes on startup.

My system specs:
AMD Turion64 ML-37(2.00GHz) / 1GB DDR @ 400MHz / 60GB 7200rpm
ATI Mobility Radeon X700 128MB
Gentoo x86-64 w/ 2.6.25 gentoo r7
ATI proprietary binary drivers 8.542
XFCE/XFWM 4.4.2
xorg server 1.4.2
xorg x11 7.3
mesa 7.2

X error with texturedxrender on:

Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x6a) [0x4885fa]
1: /lib/libc.so.6 [0x7f42754d3430]
2: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers//fglrx_drv.so(atiddxDisplayShadowIsShadowPixmap+0x16) [0x7f4273ae5a86]
3: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//glesx.so [0x7f42711da723]
4: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//libxaa.so(XAAComposite+0x191) [0x7f4272a21771]
5: /usr/lib64/xorg/modules//libxaa.so [0x7f4272a3cd41]
6: X [0x5242cf]
7: X [0x5121de]
8: X(Dispatch+0x2e2) [0x44c8b2]
9: X(main+0x45a) [0x43521a]
10: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xf4) [0x7f42754c0b74]
11: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x249) [0x434509]

Any ideas/suggestions? Thanks!

[Linuxhippy]

TexturedXRender is needed at least, to accalerate RENDER well, if its disabled fglrx falls back to software.
However it does not seem to work (well), I really hope they'll improve it soon.

[Linuxhippy]

by the way, you could leave a comment at:

http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1338

if it does not help, it for sure won't hurt

[sarunoatama]

Wow. Thanks for the fast reply! I would take any amount of it working over it causing a crash immediately. Is there any configuration that allows it to work? Different version of X or something?

Also, I guess this mean RENDER is excluded when I've read about the proprietary drivers having "full" support for 2D/3D acceleration?

[TechMage89]

Yeah, they don't count RENDER. Currently their RENDER acceleration is buggy and undocumented.

I wish they would fix this. It's one of the reasons I don't use the proprietary driver if I can help it.

[sarunoatama]

Thanks guys. I left a comment on the bugzilla bug. Maybe you should too TechMage89 (and anyone else who reads this)

I guess I'll cross my fingers for Catalyst 8.11

In the mean time, I'm off to see if a "big desktop" with real Xinerama support and direct rendering is possible with the open source drivers. That plus RENDER acceleration is all I'm really after.