Fedora 12 Graphics Issues: Cancel F13 and concentrate on fixing F12 ?

[Dave Airlie]

On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 10:02 +0100, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> On Thursday 26 November 2009 23:14:09 Dave Airlie wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-11-27 at 07:23 +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 20:16 +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote:
> > > > On 11/26/2009 07:46 PM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> > > > > On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 17:09:14 +0000,
> > > > >
> > > > >    Terry Barnaby<terry1 at beam.ltd.uk>  wrote:
> > > > >> I really want to help and get a stable release and present bug
> > > > >> reports and even fix them if I can. But, the current short term
> > > > >> release schedule, and no focus on testing and fixing graphics
> > > > >> issues, does not inspire me with confidence that a stable usable
> > > > >> release will emerge. This makes it difficult
> > > > >> for me to justify the effort. Convince me :)
> > > > >
> > > > > I follow the radeon updates pretty closely and my 9200 finally
> > > > > starting working with 3d again a few weeks before the release. Airlie
> > > > > has continued development in the f12 branch and there have been
> > > > > several updates over the last couple of weeks.
> > > > > If you have just tried F11 and not F12 you should consider doing so.
> > > > > For r5xx and below, grab a live image and install one of the smaller
> > > > > 3d apps and try it out. For r6xx and above you'll want to install
> > > > > mesa-experimental-drivers and update xorg-x11-drv-ati. This won't get
> > > > > you the kernel updates related to graphics since the release, but
> > > > > should give you a good look at where things are at so that you can
> > > > > decide if you want install F12 on the machine.
> > > >
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > I have tried out F12 on 4 different systems, 2 with different ATI
> > > > graphics and two with different Intel based boards. Only the last one
> > > > appears to be able to run Blender. You mention "Airlie has continued
> > > > development in the f12 branch". If that means there are people working
> > > > on the bugs and producing new driver updates for F12 (DRM,MESA,X11),
> > > > especially for ATI then I certainly will give it some time.
> > >
> > > So is blender working the only thing you consider as working?
> > >
> > > The current focus is on making graphics work for as many ppl as possible
> > > first, then 3D is always further down the list, this is just common
> > > sense.
> > >
> > > Current priorities are:
> > > 0) you aren't running a binary driver - if so no priority for you.
> > >
> > > a) Can you see stuff on the screen at install/boot?
> > > b) can you run GNOME desktop in reasonably useful manner? i.e. firefox
> > > runs okay, no glitches, major slowdowns etc.
> > > c) can you suspend/resume?
> > > d) can you run compiz/gnome-shell?
> > > e) can you run non-Gnome desktops at reasonable speed? (yes we have to
> > > prioritise gnome over KDE, it sucks but thats life)
> > > f) does misc 3D application run?
> > 
> > I should follow up just as far as the Red Hat X team goes a-d are what
> > we are paid to do, e/f and nice to haves, so really if some community
> > effort was to be brought up around this, e/f are where it would make
> > sense to focus it.
> 
> Hi,
> how could we (we = KDE SIG people) help with e) - serious question - not KDE 
> over Gnome flame or blaming ;-) - to make it better?
> From Red Hat's POV, KDE should be at least partially supported by X team as 
> it's official and supported component of RHEL - but this goes together with 
> Fedora.

Find a GPU developer who runs KDE ;-) and feed him treats.

Though seriously its not really a major bias, like I have things on my
list priority (a) but I still end up doing (e)&(f) tasks occasionally
for my own sanity and to take a break from staring at register dumps.

Like a bug KDE finds in the driver is still a bug, it just means I
have to go install KDE on my test machines again and that is where I
generally lag and take a few days longer.

I think the main thing non-GNOME users can do is stay on top of packages
in updates-testing and stuff as I rarely get time to regression test on
non-GNOME desktops.

Dave.