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

[Terry Barnaby]

On 11/26/2009 10:14 PM, 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.
>
> Having some sort of repos where we can publish a new
> kernel/libdrm/mesa/intel/ati/nouveau package in one block for
> people to test and find regression that isn't rawhide and isn't
> updates-testing (since it would be abusing that) would be an
> excellent place to start.
>
> Dave.
>
I use Linux in an engineering environment that requires 3D for CAD and
data visualisation. Blender is just a simple well known 3D program that
seems to exercise the 3D system to a reasonable extent. Its a simple
first pass test that I have been using.

I did mention something like your repos idea during F11. I suggested
having something like a fedora-testing-graphics repo that would have
any development packages to allow people to test new graphics related
drivers easily. One problem noted by people was the amount of work to
maintain this and keep it in sync with main fedora-updates repo though.

Also mentioned then I thought it would be good to have a basic, and simple
for users, graphics testing system to easily allow users to test and
feedback issues. Even if this is simply a short list of 2D/3D applications
and a list of operations to try. Would a graphics testing day on F12 with
the special graphics repo and some basic list of tests be useful to the
developers ?