Nouveau's OpenGL Performance Approaches The NVIDIA Driver

[jonnycat26]

You should really try to debug it, since KDE4 should work fine. It does here, and most other places.

You'll save yourself a lot of grief.

Honestly, what'll save me more grief is to just get a laptop with an NVidia based chipset. Which is what I intend to do when this one finally bites the big one.

It's fairly pathetic that to use Citrix I have to run it in a VirtualBox session...

[smitty3268]

KDE4 won't work for more than a few minutes unless I turn desktop effects off.
...
It's a HUGE regression from RadeonHD, which worked. Why that driver was abandoned, I'll never understand.

RadeonHD is a 2D-only driver, so it has nothing to do with whether or not 3D desktop effects work. That would be the mesa driver, either r300g or r300c.

I'm sure they would be interested in a backtrace from you, because your problems don't seem to be commonplace.

[whitecat]

It's fairly pathetic that to use Citrix I have to run it in a VirtualBox session...

It's more pathetic seeing you trolling on Phoronix instead of file a bug.

[HangFire]

Re: Can we see the xorg.conf used for this testing?

I still want to see the xorg.conf(s) used (if any).

I'm glad to hear AMD is putting time and money into OSS drivers, I can't wait to see the results. Really, I can't wait, so I was forced to buy an nvidia video card and run Nouveau. The OSS drivers I tried on both HD4250 and HD4290 were all so slow on my quad core system that I couldn't stand it. I'm not talking subjective speed-freak slow, I'm talking 3 seconds to paint a 1920x1200 screen from top to bottom slow. Can't possibly run video slow. Fglrx (then Radeon) was too unstable for KDE as well on two old 9xxx series cards and on new hardward as well (HD4250 and HD4290).

Note, that was not a rant about the efficacy of Open Source. (Here comes the rant...)

I spent half of 2009 and most of 2010 sorting through both AMD and NV OSS and proprietary drivers, 3 M/B, 4 video cards, with modest expectations (run a KDE desktop), across 3 distros and multiple releases of said distros, and I can say one thing with certainty. The state of ALL linux video drivers is miserable due to KMS. OSS and proprietary.

Also KDE is poorly maintained. I opened multiple KDE bug reports, all of which were closed with some verbage like "fixed in next version" which it wasn't.

KDE depends on many things working in video that used to work in pre-KMS drivers, and they just don't work any more, in just about anything. The nearly-latest Nouveau (thank you gentoo rolling release) is the first stability I've had on KDE in 1.5 years.

[pingufunkybeat]

Honestly, what'll save me more grief is to just get a laptop with an NVidia based chipset.

I recommend an Nvidia Optimus chipset.

[pingufunkybeat]

I'm not talking subjective speed-freak slow, I'm talking 3 seconds to paint a 1920x1200 screen from top to bottom slow.

This means that all acceleration was turned off.

So you bought a new card instead of seeing why the drivers were not installed properly?

[HangFire]

This means that all acceleration was turned off.

So you bought a new card instead of seeing why the drivers were not installed properly?

I guess you missed the part where I spent a year and a half working on these issues, which kind of implies I tried a LOT of stuff.

I could get stable, or I could get accelerated, but both at once was a problem, at least under KDE.

I've noticed Gnome, Nvidia, and Intel users having much less problems. Once I moved into KMS kernel era distro's, my trusty rusty S754 AGP M/B was useless due to stability issues. I booted to 8.04LTS a few times to confirm that it wasn't the hardware (though I did have an nvidia die along the way), but my shared /home user with considerable time invested in updating databases (music, e-mail, etc) to more modern versions of KDE apps made backgrading very difficult.

So, I bought a 790GX + 550BE, RMA'd it after multiple video cards and multiple distro's all got lockups while playing back video, got a different brand of 890GX, had barely better results. I could have stability or speed but not both. Every third release of Radeon (formerly fglrx) was barely useful but the other two were not.

I am not alone. There are not a lot of KDE 4 users out there any more, due to missteps in the path from KDE 3, but many have had issue with compositing video effects and KDE 4. Some of them are documented here on Phoronix.

I have now found stability with modern AMD/KDE/Linux in a "new" $50 9800GT Low Power and nouveau. I bought on-board video hoping to avoid the cost of a card, since this is an e-mail/surfing/documentation system that has very low demands. Not low enough.

The state of old Radeon card support (of which I have several) is well documented. AMD has released the specs, but it is questionable if the drivers will be finished (enough) before it won't matter any more.

[alexan]

Wow, ATI is quickly becoming a non-option even from opensource driver side.

[ChrisXY]

I could get stable, or I could get accelerated, but both at once was a problem, at least under KDE.
I've noticed Gnome, Nvidia, and Intel users having much less problems.

kwin really seems to have had issues...

Was it for you really unstable with gnome? Because on my HD 4550 and 4650 I have played warcraft3 in wine for a rather long time with r600c and now r600g...

[jonnycat26]

I'm sure they would be interested in a backtrace from you, because your problems don't seem to be commonplace.

Actually, someone's already beaten me to it:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679150

Unfortunately, this bug has been around forever and a day:

http://www.bramschoenmakers.nl/en/node/549

Or hell, just google for "radeon minimize kde crash". You only get 338,000 results.