Open-Source GPU Drivers Causing Headaches In KDE 4.5

[kazetsukai]

One point I forgot to comment on in your last post was that I whole-heartedly agree that open drivers are the only bulletproof long term solution. Its the only way to platform and architecture independence.

My overall point was that there needs to be more *constructive* criticism towards these open drivers rather than projects that implement standards ahead of these drivers. If noone cares about a bug, noone will fix it.

[bridgman]

Yes classic drivers. I have both compiled but haven't tested switching over as from what I've read Gallium doesn't quite offer any advantages yet - I would assume especially on my r700 as Gallium3d support is still so new. I'll probably try switching as soon as that changes.

OK, that makes sense. I'm guessing that you either meant a smaller time period than "years", since a year ago the classic drivers for r700 didn't have GLSL or GL2 support, and 2 years ago they didn't even exist.

If you were moving to newer hardware during the last few years you might not have seen much in the way of change because most of the visible progress until a year or so ago was bringing more or less the same functionality to new generations of hardware and laying the groundwork for future (but not yet visible) improvements.

It's probably safe to say that anyone using r3xx-r5xx hardware would see noticeable improvements via the Gallium3D driver, but you are correct that for 6xx-Evergreen owners we are just coming up on the time when folks should be looking at the Gallium3D stack unless they want to help the development process along.

My overall point was that there needs to be more *constructive* criticism towards these open drivers rather than projects that implement standards ahead of these drivers. If noone cares about a bug, noone will fix it.

The awkward reality is that the "KDE situation" is the worst possible case in many respects, in the sense that KDE developers are starting to make use of features which are also under development in the open drivers. If they were using features which had not yet been implemented the problems would be obvious, and if they were using features which had been added a year or more ago things would probably work pretty well, but since they are using features which were exposed very recently, which are working well with many applications, but which still being tested and fixed on others there is bound to be a big heap of pain unless the two groups coordinate their efforts.

[Smorg]

OK, that makes sense. I'm guessing that you either meant a smaller time period than "years", since a year ago the classic drivers for r700 didn't have GLSL or GL2 support, and 2 years ago they didn't even exist.

Forgot to mention a year ago I didn't have KMS working, which was a very welcome improvement. It seems most distros are still running X as root for some reason (I thought that was one of the primary motivations behind it.) Still, the new radeon framebuffer is finally usable and things are overall seeming much more stable. LLVMpipe sounds like an interesting thing to test out one of these days too. Not sure if it's possible on newer hardware yet.

It's probably safe to say that anyone using r3xx-r5xx hardware would see noticeable improvements via the Gallium3D driver, but you are correct that for 6xx-Evergreen owners we are just coming up on the time when folks should be looking at the Gallium3D stack unless they want to help the development process along.

This I didn't know! I'll have to test out my old 9700 pro.

[marek]

Is FBO supported on R300 devices?

FBO requires KMS.

EXT_fbo is supported in all Radeon drivers except for R100.
ARB_fbo is supported in all Radeon Gallium drivers (R300, R600), though the "multisample" subset is not currently useful.

[xeros]

Hi everyone,

i've registered myself so i can tell you about my experiences with gallium3d.

I'm one of those guys that were hit by the recent slowdown and loss of desktop effects with the recent kde 4.5.1.
I'm currently running ( as always do ) the testing branch of kubuntu Maverick. I work in linux as a living and have been lucky running development versions of kubuntu now, and slackware till recently.
So after digging and reading this thread from the begining i decided to try gallium for the first time and all i can say is, man, you are doing a great job and for any of you who are having problems with kde 4.5.1 and like i, do have an old ATI radeon x700 or something similar and are running any *ubuntu version, give https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa a try. My desktop is running a bit faster and i've got my desktop effects back.

...

Thank you all.

So, you mean the problem with KDE 4.5.x is fixed in xorg-edgers ppa for r300g?
Could you post some more information is it stable combination for yours hardware? I'm thinking about giving a try Kubuntu 10.10 and r300g with or without xorg-edgers ppa, too for my r3xx cards.

[xeros]

FBO requires KMS.

EXT_fbo is supported in all Radeon drivers except for R100.
ARB_fbo is supported in all Radeon Gallium drivers (R300, R600), though the "multisample" subset is not currently useful.

Thank you very much. r300g looks very promising and really tempts to try it.

[kraftman]

So, you mean the problem with KDE 4.5.x is fixed in xorg-edgers ppa for r300g?
Could you post some more information is it stable combination for yours hardware? I'm thinking about giving a try Kubuntu 10.10 and r300g with or without xorg-edgers ppa, too for my r3xx cards.

I ran G3d from Kubuntu ppa and the latest mesa etc. Blur was enabled, but was displayed incorectly. Using G3d I experienced problems like mouse being choppy, plasma was sometimes unresponsive for a while and there where graphical glitches in Firefox.

[rvdboom]

You will -ALWAYS-, and I mean -without exception- get a higher number on the blobs. Period. That makes the blobs more stable in my book.

I don't have the same experience. I had a lot of issues with blobs when upgrading kernels or X11, while I never had such issues with open drivers.
Early KDE4 users remembers the large amount of issues that occured with Nvidia blobs, while open drivers worked well.
Personnally, I'm 100% for open drivers. I may sometimes have some issues with compositing or stuff like that, but never to the point that X do not start and I cannot work at all.

[Veerappan]

There are probably tens of millions of Linux users in the world.

None of them want to do it.

That's why there is no work on video decode acceleration.

Well, we've got a Gallium state tracker for XvMC [1], although I don't know how well it works. There's also been some work done on shader-based H.264 decode acceleration by several groups [2], but I haven't seen anything finished yet.

I'm currently looking for an adviser for my thesis proposal which will attempt an OpenCL port of the VP8 video decoder. If that pans out, we might have working OpenCL-based decoding of VP8 video on Win/Mac/BSD/Linux in the next year or so. I know Clover isn't finished yet, but when it is, hopefully my project should work just fine on it (and I know someone else on the forums here who may be looking at working on clover).

It's not that no one wants to work on video acceleration. I will admit that there's very few people who want to try it, and very few people who are willing to invest the required time learning the base technologies and the time doing the actual coding/testing.


[1] http://www.bitblit.org/gsoc/g3dvl/index.shtml
[2] http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=33802

[hteles]

So, you mean the problem with KDE 4.5.x is fixed in xorg-edgers ppa for r300g?
Could you post some more information is it stable combination for yours hardware? I'm thinking about giving a try Kubuntu 10.10 and r300g with or without xorg-edgers ppa, too for my r3xx cards.

Hi xeros,

The only visible problem that i'm getting is with the taskbar thumbnails, they are all black, other than that my desktop seems smoother, by all means i mean kwin seems smoother

I ran G3d from Kubuntu ppa and the latest mesa etc. Blur was enabled, but was displayed incorectly. Using G3d I experienced problems like mouse being choppy, plasma was sometimes unresponsive for a while and there where graphical glitches in Firefox.

Hi, i'm not using blur neither wobbly windows, or any advanced effects since i'm waiting for a new cpu cooler to arrive from Singapore or my acer will fry short.
But, i'm not having any render artifacts, neither in kwin or chromium-browser. As a side note i0ve tested the g3d with neverball as someone sugested ( i'm not a gamer ) and after 5 minutes of playing my acer freezed, no sysrq magic could do the trick, but the same thing happens when i'm running more intensive stuff on the acer. How long did you try g3d?

Specs:

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on RV410
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9-devel
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20