Fedora 20 Will Be Released Next Week

[Bucic]

Tearing on Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge (not sure if Haswell) is caused by hardware engineers removing a feature related to Scan-Out during the jump to the "Intel HD" graphics core. The only REAL solution is DRI3 + Present

Removing the feature from where? The intel drivers or hardware?

My hardware is GM45 so Gen4, BTW.

Thanks for the video presentation!

[AdamW]

bucic: maybe I can give you a slightly different perspective. we do care, we really do, about all the real problems people run into. I haven't met anyone working on F/OSS who really didn't care about users hitting problems, even the most elitist of devs.

But here's the thing. I've worked for a tiny tiny Linux company (Mandriva) and a huge one (Red Hat), and even at RH...we never have anywhere near enough people for everything. Nowhere even close.

AFAIK, there are three people working full time on graphics development for Red Hat - that's both Fedora and RHEL. Three people. They're responsible for all of this - every generation of NVIDIA, Intel and Radeon hardware for every release of Fedora and RHEL. They're just never going to get to everything, it is human nature. The Intel driver has, I think, the most resources dedicated to its upstream development out of the three, by Intel and by other companies, but it's still really not that well-resourced.

Every F/OSS dev I've ever met has been super dedicated and driven and worked well beyond the call of duty or their set working hours or anything like that. But equally, they have all been _insanely_ busy. RH isn't particularly stingy with development resources, but it's just not economically feasible for RH to throw a dozen or two developers at the graphics stack, which is what it would really need.

[Ericg]

Removing the feature from where? The intel drivers or hardware?

My hardware is GM45 so Gen4, BTW.

Thanks for the video presentation!

Feature got removed from hardware. It was called like 'TearFree Mode" or "No-Tear Mode" something like that. I THINK anything Pre-Sandy Bridge had it, it def wasn't there in Sandy Bridge though. Which makes you hitting a tearing bug interesting since DRI2 + TearFree Mode + Compositing.... shouldn't be tearing on Pre-Sandy Bridge

[Ericg]

bucic: maybe I can give you a slightly different perspective. we do care, we really do, about all the real problems people run into. I haven't met anyone working on F/OSS who really didn't care about users hitting problems, even the most elitist of devs.

But here's the thing. I've worked for a tiny tiny Linux company (Mandriva) and a huge one (Red Hat), and even at RH...we never have anywhere near enough people for everything. Nowhere even close.

AFAIK, there are three people working full time on graphics development for Red Hat - that's both Fedora and RHEL. Three people. They're responsible for all of this - every generation of NVIDIA, Intel and Radeon hardware for every release of Fedora and RHEL. They're just never going to get to everything, it is human nature. The Intel driver has, I think, the most resources dedicated to its upstream development out of the three, by Intel and by other companies, but it's still really not that well-resourced.

Every F/OSS dev I've ever met has been super dedicated and driven and worked well beyond the call of duty or their set working hours or anything like that. But equally, they have all been _insanely_ busy. RH isn't particularly stingy with development resources, but it's just not economically feasible for RH to throw a dozen or two developers at the graphics stack, which is what it would really need.

I know this was directed to Bucic, but I want to just pop in briefly. I don't think anyone here is implying that Red Hat as awhole doesn't care or isn't putting forth effort, Red Hat's done a lot of great work with the Linux Ecosystem and the work is appreciated, and we are aware that the Devs are working their asses off getting as many things done as they can. Its just extra annoying to me as a user, and as enthusiast, that this work didn't land for Fedora 20 and doesnt seem like it WILL-- especially given that during the release planning of Xorg 1.15 the Fedora 20 schedule was the ONLY distro-related reference point used, and I'm fairly certain that Ajax himself was in the room.

What makes it even more annoying is that at this rate, DRI3 and Present-- the "stopgaps" for Xorg to make it more Wayland-like wont hit Fedora now.. Until the move over to Wayland occurs (currently targeted at F21 according to the Feature Wiki) so the amount of people on the Fedora side who can benefit from the work that Keith has been doing gets limited, as well as those bugs remaining unfixed for another six months.

[AdamW]

I know this was directed to Bucic, but I want to just pop in briefly. I don't think anyone here is implying that Red Hat as awhole doesn't care or isn't putting forth effort, Red Hat's done a lot of great work with the Linux Ecosystem and the work is appreciated, and we are aware that the Devs are working their asses off getting as many things done as they can. Its just extra annoying to me as a user, and as enthusiast, that this work didn't land for Fedora 20 and doesnt seem like it WILL-- especially given that during the release planning of Xorg 1.15 the Fedora 20 schedule was the ONLY distro-related reference point used, and I'm fairly certain that Ajax himself was in the room.

What makes it even more annoying is that at this rate, DRI3 and Present-- the "stopgaps" for Xorg to make it more Wayland-like wont hit Fedora now.. Until the move over to Wayland occurs (currently targeted at F21 according to the Feature Wiki) so the amount of people on the Fedora side who can benefit from the work that Keith has been doing gets limited, as well as those bugs remaining unfixed for another six months.

I should emphasize I haven't specifically talked to ajax about this, I'm just going on past experience. You know more about this discussion you're referring to than I do - I wasn't there and don't know the first thing about it!

If I remember to, next time I'm talking to ajax I'll ask him about this stuff and if they have any plans for F20, or if it's F21 stuff at this point.

(I'm running F21 now, BTW. Doesn't seem to have any hideous explosion bugs in it yet. Come on in, the water's lukewarm and I haven't seen any sharks yet!)

[AdamW]

Feature got removed from hardware. It was called like 'TearFree Mode" or "No-Tear Mode" something like that. I THINK anything Pre-Sandy Bridge had it, it def wasn't there in Sandy Bridge though. Which makes you hitting a tearing bug interesting since DRI2 + TearFree Mode + Compositing.... shouldn't be tearing on Pre-Sandy Bridge

Yeah, that part sounds like the most interesting part to me as well. I wonder if there is some command or log you can inspect to find out for sure if your specific system includes this hardware feature or not?

[Bucic]

Feature got removed from hardware. It was called like 'TearFree Mode" or "No-Tear Mode" something like that. I THINK anything Pre-Sandy Bridge had it, it def wasn't there in Sandy Bridge though. Which makes you hitting a tearing bug interesting since DRI2 + TearFree Mode + Compositing.... shouldn't be tearing on Pre-Sandy Bridge

Yes, I have a pre-Sandy Bridge chipset, that's why the explanation with the removal of hardware feature seemed fishy to me! I can boot F18 official livecd right now and it won't tear. It will start as soon as I install it and update it. It's all there in my bug reports.

[Ericg]

I should emphasize I haven't specifically talked to ajax about this, I'm just going on past experience. You know more about this discussion you're referring to than I do - I wasn't there and don't know the first thing about it!

If I remember to, next time I'm talking to ajax I'll ask him about this stuff and if they have any plans for F20, or if it's F21 stuff at this point.

(I'm running F21 now, BTW. Doesn't seem to have any hideous explosion bugs in it yet. Come on in, the water's lukewarm and I haven't seen any sharks yet!)

Xorg Foundation put up a video copy of the release schedule meeting, its only 10 minutes long: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdd0zFQCU_I&html5=1

Isn't that Ajax's voice around the 5 minute mark saying that he just wanted a release done by the Beta release and after that he didn't care? Obviously, things can get changed things come up, understandably. That talk is just the only reference-able discussion I've seen or heard so that's all we've got to go on unless someone else can chime in with a link to a mailing list or the likes saying "The plans been changed."

Xorg 1.15 Release Candidate was: November 1, 2013
Fedora 20 Beta Release date was: November 11, 2013

[Bucic]

Are menu icons and context menu icons still missing in F20? Gconf-editor menus_have_icons/buttons_have_icons options don't work.

[daedaluz]

Did update from F19 to F20 wth fedup today. Had some problems, mainly had to pull newer fedup version from updates-testing in order to do that. Such a blunder from dev side! After that fedup wasn't all that smooth, had to manually yum distro-sync to get some bits right and even after that remove and reinstall LibreOffice so it would use fc20 packages. So not so smooth... but hey at least the system works perfectly post-update those small glitches aside, which has never been the case for me with Ubuntu.

System itself is nearly flawless (running GNOME 3.10). Some plugins from GNOME 3.8 weren't compatible, luckily simple visit to extensions.gnome.org and getting new ones manually fixed that. Evolution also has a glitch in menus, the titles are invisible until hovering mouse over them. Well, at least then they stay visible until closing. Oddly the new quicksettings menu lacks bluetooth options, otherwise I find it superior to competition. Also had to purge Rhythmbox databases and settings, something caused one core to be used fully before doing that.

Those few glitches aside (those were all) smooth sailing. Random stuttering in compositing and tearing in video playback which occasionally happened in F19 are now gone. I really like the new titlebar system, so much more screen estate with applications following that HIG. Also a huge boon is that taskbar now supports right-clicking to minimize/maximize/close applications from there. The new Software application is already IMHO much better than Ubuntu's software centre. So much cleaner design. Might also play a role that Fedora has cleaner repositories. No random books or pay-software to be seen.

I'd say overall better than F19 was. I obviously had some post-upgrade issues there as well, moving from F18 to F19-beta to F19. Now that I think about it, this might be the longest streak I've ever stayed on one distro. Small nuisances and random problems I get in every other distro just don't exist here. Definitely recommending.