Re: Debian Installer 7.0 Beta1 release

[Sam Morris <sam@robots.org.uk>]

On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 12:36 +0200, Julien Cristau wrote:
> On Mon, Aug  6, 2012 at 10:45:31 +0100, Sam Morris wrote:
> 
> > IIRC I built mesa with 3.0. I'll take a look at the patches. I also just
> > realised that I didn't run the X server with LD_LIBRARY_PATH set... is
> > that a problem, or is it just the clients that need the llvmpipe
> > libGL.so.1? Sorry for the dumb question, but my understanding of how all
> > the different bits of mesa/dri fit together is rather poor...
> > 
> Should be enough to run the session with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1.
> 
> Cheers,
> Julien

I've now had some time to test this out. Currently gnome-shell is not
usable with llvmpipe:

     1. The screen flickers when switching between applications, or when
        entering/leaving overview mode. The flickering is between the
        correct screen contents and a copy of the old screen contents.
        For instance, while typing this message I go into overview mode.
        I then click on Evolution's composer window, and the composer
        comes to the front. However, after the animation finishes, only
        the composer's text entry area is visible; the rest of the
        screen still displays the overview mode. The other applications
        are still present, however, as clicking where I know the windows
        are placed causes them to flicker to the foreground. The
        applications themselves seem functional, but it'such impossible
        to actually use them. This behaviour does not show up if I use
        gnome-shell's screen recording feature to make a movie. I took a
        grainy movie with my phone however; you can see it at
        <http://youtu.be/synr-avC0WA>.
     2. There is a small but noticeable delay between an event occurring
        (e.g., pressing a key on the keyboard, or moving the mouse) and
        the screen being updated. Worse, the delay is variable (hold
        down a key while gedit has the focus and characters appear at an
        uneven rate). This may be another aspect of whatever is causing
        the first issue.
     3. The mouse pointer continually warps to the top-left corner of
        the screen, triggering the overview mode at random. This is a
        bug in the evdev input driver, filed as
        <http://bugs.debian.org/688860>.

I can try building mesa with LLVM 3.1, and/or try some of the patches at
<http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mesa.git/tree/?h=f17> or
<http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/mesa.git/tree/?h=f18> if you think
they will help.

Regards,

-- 
Sam Morris <sam@robots.org.uk>