Martin Takes His Mesa Issues To The List

[bridgman]

This is probably true and this makes me thinking if I shouldn't just trow my card away, because I don't care about gnome at all. If open source drivers I'm using are made for gnome they're useless for me. I didn't have very good experience with nvidia blobs, but at least nvidia cares about KDE and I noticed most of the nvidia users chooses KDE. If os drivers won't be playing good with KDE I'll simply switch to something better. I guess many people will do the same.

???

The open source drivers aren't *made* for gnome, it just seems that relatively more of the developers working on the drivers use gnome than use kde. Similarly, the developer working on kde (actually kwin, I guess), happens to have an NVidia GPU in his system, so KDE gets tested more on NVidia hardware with the proprietary driver.

Using the same logic you could say that KDE doesn't care about anything besides NVidia proprietary drivers, but that wouldn't be true either. Beating up on either of the developer groups isn't going to change anything - they're all working really hard and making difficult choices re: where to spend their limited time.

What might be a better use of time is trying to loosely coordinate release schedules for drivers and "close to driver" projects like compositors, and organizing some "power user" testing of driver and compositor release candidates against each other before either locks down for good. There are enough volunteers trying and testing new code to make this fly but if we could guide the testing towards the appropriate *combinations* of code we could get a lot more benefit from the same work.

[Kano]

Well maybe they are lucky and everbody complains about unity or gnome shell so more ppl will use kde

[smitty3268]

The Mesa developers said that they don't consider KDE to be one of its most important targets. That makes me wonder: if the first or second most-used X11 window manager isn't one of their most important targets, then who is? They don't say.

I think they did say - it's whatever projects they are actually being paid to support. I'm certain there are some Red Hat or other devs being paid to make sure that Gnome Shell or Compiz are working. Apparently none of the distros have ponied up to make any developer responsible for KWin support.

[smitty3268]

I assume Martin has already updated the KWin compositing whitelist to include the new Intel driver. So biggest problem here seems to be that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) are unlikely to provide the KDE update in a timely manner?

Also, drivers lying about their capabilities should be regarded as a critical driver bug. I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a window manager to handle that gracefully. Again I assume that driver bug was fixed fairly quick, and that what made it a big problem was that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) were unlikely to provide the driver update in a timely manner.

To me, these are just more reasons to prefere rolling release distributions. They get updates and fixes to their users as soon as possible.

No he hasn't, and he's said he won't do so in a stable KDE release because of the possibility of regressions. So he's waiting for KDE 4.7.

Ubuntu has fixed the issue by patching Mesa to add GEM back into the intel driver string. Apparently the Fedora guys want an actual fix, so it's not yet clear if they will create the patch themselves or if KDE will make one for 4.7 and Fedora will just backport it.

[Kano]

It depends, when you look at debian i would not say that sid is the best branch. It is ok, when you are experienced and you can handle the things which usually happen. But is a pain to support lots of others which ran in into problems. I did that and it was no fun at the end. Also debian got maybe a bit outdated too due to the long freeze. I do not use arch (or gentoo) however, but i prefer the way of selected backports. I have got no problem when there would be a kde 4.x backport repo. It just has to install without problems. It is basically a good thing when you have got a stable system you can base your updates on. Of course not every package will be the latest one possible, but is that really needed? I had to patch a handfull of lines to compile nouveau with xserver 1.7. I get most likely the same speed as when you run 1.10, so what did you gain?

[RagingDragon]

I think this is a distribution problem

I assume Martin has already updated the KWin compositing whitelist to include the new Intel driver. So biggest problem here seems to be that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) are unlikely to provide the KDE update in a timely manner?

Also, drivers lying about their capabilities should be regarded as a critical driver bug. I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect a window manager to handle that gracefully. Again I assume that driver bug was fixed fairly quick, and that what made it a big problem was that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions) were unlikely to provide the driver update in a timely manner.

To me, these are just more reasons to prefere rolling release distributions. They get updates and fixes to their users as soon as possible.

[kraftman]

I guess they don't care about kde (and I don't blame 'em).
Perhaps one of the Novell mesa developers can test kde and make sure it works for suse distros.

This is probably true and this makes me thinking if I shouldn't just trow my card away, because I don't care about gnome at all. If open source drivers I'm using are made for gnome they're useless for me. I didn't have very good experience with nvidia blobs, but at least nvidia cares about KDE and I noticed most of the nvidia users chooses KDE. If os drivers won't be playing good with KDE I'll simply switch to something better. I guess many people will do the same.

[mattst88]

Honestly, I don't get how this is the responsibility of anyone but Intel/Mesa. If you look at the change to the renderer line, it wasn't done for any purpose. It didn't change vocabulary to convey a different feature-set. All they did was remove "GEM" from the renderer line. Why Intel? It doesn't make any sense. It was a careless change that served no useful purpose.

Open-source developers, stop changing stuff just to change it. It breaks other code.

Maybe do a little bit of research before you start spouting off when you have absolutely no idea what you're saying?

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2011-March/006321.html

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=de579a16298e29358fec08bd7cfe3e505674705a

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?h=7.10&id=b0a7492aebeb4517346f0da2362d6991a7385b59

[not.sure]

They're simply morons. Some of them are paid by Red Hat and it seems Red Hat doesn't care about desktops at all.

I guess they don't care about kde (and I don't blame 'em).
Perhaps one of the Novell mesa developers can test kde and make sure it works for suse distros.

[Nille]

More tests on Mesa wouldn't hurt either.
(Hint: Including starting multiple apps that use the card to see if they mess up.)

Mesa has an Test Suit but there are no tests for KDE. Maybe because none from KWin want to make an piglit test.