Mesa 17.3 Remains Quite Buggy, Developer Calls For Better Handling In The Future

[Melcar]

I always have the best experience with the x-swat ppa. I generally use oibaf too, but I have to agree with others that it sometimes breaks things. Far less than the Padoka ppa, but it can sometimes nuke your system on next reboot if you're careless. When I want stability, x-swat works wonders for me. However, oibaf gives me the best performance.

[swizzler]

Mesa 17.3 also regressed badly for me: x11perf -putiamge10 is now only at 30% the throughput it was with 17.2.
Bisected and reported, no response till now :/

I couldn't find any bug reported for x11perf in that timeframe. Can you point me to it?

[swizzler]

Don´t mesa devs do "continious integration" and "regression testing" or something like that. I only know the buzz words, but I thought those things are pretty common these days. Maybe its more difficult with mesa because you need a lot of real hardware and can not test in virtual machines reliably. Thus maybe they should corporate with michael or a serious big linux distrubution that has such a hardware park to test before release. The Linux Foundation (in the name of security?) or crowdfunding somehow would need to cover the costs.

So yeah, I think mesa could be much more stable and this is not only since 17.3. If they do not test each driver at least once on one real machine and thus end up shipping a completely broken RADV, then something in their QA mindset / implementation is wrong.

Mesa devs at Intel run tens of millions of tests continuously on all hardware shipped since 2007. That's why many people can run safely with drivers from the oibaf ppa

[Rallos Zek]

The worst part of Mesa is that it can freeze the hole system by just opening a game that previously worked fine. Though I thought most bugs get fixed before a final Mesa release, at least this was my hope. From my point of view what really needs a fix are the AMDGPU drivers, if I turn my monitor off and on again on Plasma-Wayland, the system crashes and the display stays black until reboot. Same issue appears if the monitor woke up from sleep.
I think it is a valid point that Mesa needs some quality improvements.

I wouldn't blame Mesa too fast for that, Wayland is in itself an a unstable mess so try plasma with X.org and see if it happens there.

[nuetzel]

Mesa 17.3 also regressed badly for me: x11perf -putiamge10 is now only at 30% the throughput it was with 17.2.
Bisected and reported, no response till now :/

Uh, Cl...,

not that negative, please.
I've tried to revert Marek's commit to get some current numbers on Polaris 20 for _Marek_.
Need some more time to 'revert' it by hand...

Current (with commit):

x11perf - X11 performance program, version 1.2
The X.Org Foundation server version 11906000 on :0
from SunWave1
Fri Feb 23 02:46:59 2018

Sync time adjustment is 0.0534 msecs.

800000 reps @ 0.0125 msec ( 80200.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square
800000 reps @ 0.0127 msec ( 78800.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square
800000 reps @ 0.0128 msec ( 78200.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square
800000 reps @ 0.0125 msec ( 80300.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square
800000 reps @ 0.0128 msec ( 78100.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square
4000000 trep @ 0.0126 msec ( 79100.0/sec): PutImage 10x10 square

[nuetzel]

The worst part of Mesa is that it can freeze the hole system by just opening a game that previously worked fine. Though I thought most bugs get fixed before a final Mesa release, at least this was my hope. From my point of view what really needs a fix are the AMDGPU drivers, if I turn my monitor off and on again on Plasma-Wayland, the system crashes and the display stays black until reboot. Same issue appears if the monitor woke up from sleep.
I think it is a valid point that Mesa needs some quality improvements.

Did you send a ticket on Bugzilla?

[nuetzel]

I couldn't find any bug reported for x11perf in that timeframe. Can you point me to it?

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105171

It's from Linuxhippy.

[franglais125]

Mesa devs at Intel run tens of millions of tests continuously on all hardware shipped since 2007. That's why many people can run safely with drivers from the oibaf ppa

My SandyBridge (2012) begs to differ. Mesa is semi-broken in every other release.

[pal666]

I think Mesa should be ditched from every distro, so that user could install what release he wants/needs.

for that you want the opposite: distros should provide selection of mesa releases. if your distro doesn't, choose better one

[pal666]

Wayland is in itself an a unstable mess so try plasma with X.org

wayland is a specification. mess is plasma's implementation