Updated and Optimized Ubuntu Free Graphics Drivers

[Espionage724]

I was under the impression that radeon didn't support VA-API directly, but had to have it wrapped through VDPAU (which, last I checked was pretty bad)?

[smitty3268]

I was under the impression that radeon didn't support VA-API directly, but had to have it wrapped through VDPAU (which, last I checked was pretty bad)?

That was only true until they added the VAAPI state tracker into Mesa. (Which happened very recently)

[Espionage724]

Hmm, so I had this problem for a while now but didn't bother looking into it. I use an old laptop hooked up to a TV via VGA for Plex Home Theater, and it has an Intel 915GM for the graphics. I'm running Lubuntu 14.04.1 on it, and tried the stock kernel, 3.16, and 3.17. Currently I'm using the mainline 3.17 kernel.

With the default graphics stack, glxgears and PHT run fine. PHT is a bit on the slow side though, but works for most videos.

Whenever I add the oibaf PPA though and reboot, glxgears and PHT don't work. glxgears "does" work, but nothing is rendered onscreen (Terminal says it's rendering though). I've only seen this happen one other time, where things wouldn't render on the screen unless compositing was enabled on dual graphics hardware. On another note, I noticed gpu-mananger log said that the 915GM chip required offloading, but I'm unsure why it would.

As for PHT, it segfaults on startup (nothing in Terminal more detailed than that). I had an idea that maybe enabling compositing would help, but if that were the case, I would figure PHT to work fine, and just not render.

Any ideas? So far I've tried to use UXA and Glamor and ilo to no avail.

[ubuntuaddicted]

reverting ppa does NOT revert mesa packages or am I wrong?

I recently ran into an issue where I had some old mesa packages installed (which I believe are from when I was runnning oibaf ppa back when I had an AMD GPU.) i was trying to compile obs-studio to livestream my gaming sessions but it couldn't because of a dependency to a certain version of libglapi-mesa, it needed version 10.1.3-0ubuntu0.2 but libglapi-mesa 10.2~git1402150730.1020d8~gd~s was installed. Am I wrong in thinking that the 10.2~git version was from the oibaf saucy ppa? I couldn't really figure out where that version came from BUT until I clicked through all these mesa packages and used synaptic to force a certain version, the version supplied by trusty (which removed a ton of software in the process) I couldn't compile obs-studio.

is this normal behavior? why when I upgraded to trusty did those mesa packages not update to the trusty version from the saucy oibaf ppa?

[gutigen]

I've recently noticed something - Oibaf PPA is not built with DRI3, but DRI2, right? If this is correct, how DRI3 actually could affect performance or feature set etc and why it's not used (release date is 2013)?

[okias]

I've recently noticed something - Oibaf PPA is not built with DRI3, but DRI2, right? If this is correct, how DRI3 actually could affect performance or feature set etc and why it's not used (release date is 2013)?

Ubuntu 14.04 can't fulfill requirements for DRI3, so it'll be easily posible probably since 14.10 (with some patching Radeon DDX)

[gutigen]

Ubuntu 14.04 can't fulfill requirements for DRI3, so it'll be easily posible probably since 14.10 (with some patching Radeon DDX)

Hmm, I'm on 14.10, now where is Oibaf!?!

[oibaf]

I've recently noticed something - Oibaf PPA is not built with DRI3, but DRI2, right? If this is correct, how DRI3 actually could affect performance or feature set etc and why it's not used (release date is 2013)?

dri3 is enabled in mesa since many months ago, just checks the build logs and also looks previous posts in this thread (it was disabled for saucy because that broke steam, but it was always enabled since 14.04).
dri3 also requires xorg 1.16, so it is effective only on Ubuntu 14.10 which has it and with supported drivers.

[gutigen]

dri3 is enabled in mesa since many months ago, just checks the build logs and also looks previous posts in this thread (it was disabled for saucy because that broke steam, but it was always enabled since 14.04).
dri3 also requires xorg 1.16, so it is effective only on Ubuntu 14.10 which has it and with supported drivers.

Yep, obviously I was wrong, thanks for clarification Btw, I wild guess - xorg 1.16 and dri3 are the reason why I had such big performance boost when I switched to 14.10 from 14.04 (was using latest kernel and your PPA on both), right?

[Espionage724]

...so it is effective only on Ubuntu 14.10 which has it and with supported drivers.

Hmm; I guess Radeon isn't supported yet. I thought I recalled seeing an article about it a little while ago; but does anyone know the status of DRI3 with Radeon?