Open-Source GPU Drivers Causing Headaches In KDE 4.5

[V!NCENT]

BTW I totaly forgot to thank Michael for covering some non-massive-KDE-release-news!

[KAMiKAZOW]

Thing is if you want to create a desktop that runs on Linux, you need to invest something. Why don't the kwin guys get a community team of testers together and have the testers provide feedback before deploying to the greater community? Surely KDE has enough users to set something like that up?

Even back with compiz, compiz devs asked gpu devs for work to be done, clutter guys have made sure we are aware of issues up front before they deploy.

I find it amusing and revealing that you Xorg guys seem to expect everyone to test your software but yourself. You are the ones shipping buggy features. Why don't you just write test programs yourself? Xorg is a project run by serveral multi-billion dollar companies. Besides the Linux kernel itself, you have the most corporate resources available in the entire Linux ecosystem and yet Xorg is the achilles heel of all Linux distributions.

[allquixotic]

I find it amusing and revealing that you Xorg guys seem to expect everyone to test your software but yourself. You are the ones shipping buggy features. Why don't you just write test programs yourself? Xorg is a project run by serveral multi-billion dollar companies. Besides the Linux kernel itself, you have the most corporate resources available in the entire Linux ecosystem and yet Xorg is the achilles heel of all Linux distributions.

Because the guys working on open source graphics are just a few drops in the bucket, so to speak, relative to the organizations they work for. They don't exactly have all the resources of their parent company at their disposal. They are more or less annexed off as a separate R&D team, and they can't be given help even by the proprietary driver developers because that would potentially pollute the open drivers with patented knowledge that the company isn't willing to expose in the open. Yes, I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it's the truth.

Their answer is going to be: without an increase in manpower, what would you like us to focus more on; writing tests, or implementing those unimplemented/stubbed GL extensions that are keeping your game from working? Take your pick.

The real political/economic motivator here would be to convince the people at the very top (CEO of Intel, CEO of AMD, etc) that open source graphics drivers are absolutely essential for millions of their customers, and that they will lose these customers to the competition if they refuse to dramatically increase staffing on R&D of open source graphics drivers. Failing that, the situation will deteriorate so long as the staffing level remains constant as the complexity of the hardware increases.

[drag]

I find it amusing and revealing that you Xorg guys seem to expect everyone to test your software but yourself. You are the ones shipping buggy features. Why don't you just write test programs yourself? Xorg is a project run by serveral multi-billion dollar companies. Besides the Linux kernel itself, you have the most corporate resources available in the entire Linux ecosystem and yet Xorg is the achilles heel of all Linux distributions.

Your not being very bright here.

The Xorg/Mesa people actually do have a lot of test programs they run and they are well aware of the limitation and problems with the drivers they are shipping.

It's more important to users to have drivers that do something then to be waiting perfect drivers that will not exist for another decade.

Xorg/Mesa/Gnome/et al do not have the same level of apparent luxury that KDE does. They are applications and software that need to ship working software _now_.

Nobody can afford to abandon Xorg and switch to a new window method and tell the users:

"Well all software compatibility is completely irrelevant to us now. We are working on something new and perfect and it won't exist in a usable form for another 7 years. Have fun!"

Even with the commercial backing of Trolltech and now Nokia the KDE folks are still so backwards that they are depending on Khtml instead of switching to Webkit. Their solution? Make users choose to use the better renderer. If you don't understand why this is insane, then just keep further desktop discussions to yourself until you figure out some reality.


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seriously:

With 100% seriousness.. KDE should just abandon Linux compatibility as a priority and switch to being a alternative desktop shell for Windows 7 users.

Then when the Xorg/Mesa/Gnome/Redhat/Novell/etc folks get the graphics APIs and sound APIs fixed other niggling driver issues resolved then KDE can switch back.

I am sure that KDE developer folks have been swell bunch of guys that understand and care about the platform, but the KDE users have been a thorn in the side of progress and caused unending strife and insanity in online discussions for decades.

That will allow them to concentrating on perfecting the desktop and see how it compares in the real-world against the Windows and OS X desktop without all the Linux bullshit getting in the way. They will LEARN ALOT and it would be hugely beneficial to their progress and will, without a doubt, attract a huge number of new users. Far greater then Linux/Gnome ever will.

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The KDE kwin developer has a point:

It's horseshit that the drivers are advertising features that are not working or are so poorly performing that they might as well be considered broken.

This is pretty damn obvious to me.

As far as any Xorg developer defending this, they should seriously rethink their attitude.

But, personally, I'd rather have them spend their time improving the drivers then doing much else.

[pingufunkybeat]

Like I said:

The KDE hate on here is hilarious.

The guys are just writing a desktop environment, and a recent optional function in the project's window manager -- which only uses ADVERTISED functionality after a number of sanity checks -- works poorly with the OSS driver stack. The issue wasn't communicated completely transparently.

But yeah, we should kill them. Kill them all. Send them to Windows. Burn their children.

You guys rock. The KDE folks have written millions of lines of code over the last 15 years and provided it to the community for free. And the best that you can do is "my blurz don't workz! KILL KILL"

Hilarious.

[pingufunkybeat]

Just for the record: KWin has several rendering backends, including XRender. It can use a number of backends for Plasma too, including a fully software-based rasterizer.

Gnome Shell will not work without full OpenGL acceleration. Period.

You're bitching about an optional blur plugin, but as it stands, the comparable GNOME technology won't even start on much of Nvidia hardware out there.

[V!NCENT]

What particular OpenGL functions are not working?

(Now that I come to think about it; GS can't even work without compositing)

[marek]

I find it amusing and revealing that you Xorg guys seem to expect everyone to test your software but yourself. You are the ones shipping buggy features.

We do this all the time. We test every game we get our hands on. We write test programs. We already have thousands of OpenGL compliance tests and there were only a few hundreds a year ago, quite a difference, isn't it? There are new tests almost every day:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/piglit/log/?ofs=50

And after all that, I see this:

Why don't you just write test programs yourself?

Looks like a joke to me.

[deanjo]

That sounds like a good compromise, and would avoid the need to venture "so close to the edge" in terms of driver functionality. Might be the best answer so far.

I'm not sure you can really consider hardware capabilities that have been around for 4 years "so close to the edge".

[wien]

I'm not sure you can really consider hardware capabilities that have been around for 4 years "so close to the edge".

They're close to the edge of where the open source graphics stack is at the moment. That's the real world developers have to live in if they want to support the platform.

Everyone whishes the stack was further along, but it just isn't. Not even a forum full of indignant remarks is going to change that. Patches might.