radeon driver broken??

[hpg]

On my box there is an on board AMD Radeon 3100 graphics card. After installing saucy I immediately saw, that graphics is much smoother and faster than it was before. I could even activate Blur effect. Earlier, when activating this one, graphics performance degraded heavily. But on saucy, it didn't do any harm.
On Monday 30-Sep, I did an upgrade, in which a new kernel was included. update-initramfs complained about 'possibly missing hardware ..'. After reboot, graphics performance was worse than ever.
I found a bug, attached to that, and today I got the message, that it has been fixed and missing firmware is included in linux-firmware 1-115. I did an upgrade, firmware went to 1.115, update-initramfs did not complain. After reboot, graphics performance was slightly better than before. I tried to config desktop effects and saw. that it is not possible to select OPENGL compositing type and RASTER backend. When applying these, it says 6 desktop effects could not be loaded which were among others: Blur and desktop cube animation
When rebooting the system, compositing type automatically sets to XRENDER, backend sets to NATIVE.
Now I am not sure, what is going on. Maybe the radeon driver is broken, maybe the X server needs to be reconfigured. Can anyone tell me where to start looking to find where the problem lies?

regards
Hans-Peter

[Rog132]

Could you add the link to the bug report ?

Older link - Thread: no desktop effects: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...esktop-effects

The Kwin has seen lot of changes so the thread is only giving hints what to look.


Picking:

Is the direct rendering yes ?
If you restart the kwin from the konsole - do you get a useful error message ?
If you edit the kwinrc and then restart the kwin - what error do you get ?

At here:

:~$ glxinfo | grep -i direct
direct rendering: Yes
rog132@saucybeta:~$ kwin --replace
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
kwin(2373)/kdecore (KSycoca) KSycocaPrivate:penDatabase: Trying to open ksycoca from "/var/tmp/kdecache-rog132/ksycoca4"
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD BARTS
OpenGL version string: 3.1 (Core Profile) Mesa 9.2.0
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40
Driver: R600G
GPU class: NI
OpenGL version: 3.1
GLSL version: 1.40
Mesa version: 9.2
X server version: 1.14.2
Linux kernel version: 3.11
Direct rendering: yes
Requires strict binding: no
GLSL shaders: yes
Texture NPOT support: yes
Virtual Machine: no
kwin(2373)/kdecore (KSycoca) KSycocaPrivate:penDatabase: Trying to open ksycoca from "/var/tmp/kdecache-rog132/ksycoca4"
kwin(2373)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*) KSystemTimeZonesPrivate::instance: instance(): ... initialised
kwin(2373)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*) KSystemTimeZonesPrivate::readConfig: readConfig(): local zone= "Europe/Helsinki"
kwin(2373)/kdecore (K*TimeZone*) KSystemTimeZonesPrivate::readZoneTab: readZoneTab( "/usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab" )

[hpg]

This is the bug, I am referring to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1218691

direct rendering seems to be enabled:
hp@hp:~$ glxinfo | grep -i direct
direct rendering: Yes

restarting kwin is not really helpful:
hp@hp:~$ kwin --replace
QDBusConnection: session D-Bus connection created before QCoreApplication. Application may misbehave.
Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf", line 14: reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated.
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
QCoreApplication::sendPostedEvents: Cannot send posted events for objects in another thread
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_blur" is not supported
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_wobblywindows" is not supported
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_flipswitch" is not supported
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_startupfeedback" is not supported
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_cube" is not supported
kwin(3067) KWin::EffectsHandlerImpl::loadEffect: EffectsHandler::loadEffect : Effect "kwin4_effect_cubeslide" is not supported

restarting kwin after editing kwinrc doens't give any other result
maybe this is interesting in kwinrc:
[$Version]
update_info=kwin_remove_effects.upd:kwin4.7_effect s

I followed the advice in the old thread - editing kwinrc - but this has no effect, too.

[Rog132]

The KDE Community Forums thread: Kwin falls back to XRender after updating to KDE 4.10 - http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=111&t=109963 has some tips what to look & try.

More of the command:

KWIN_COMPOSE=O2 kwin --graphicssystem raster --replace &

can be found http://community.kde.org/KWin/Environment_Variables

KWIN_COMPOSE

The environment variable KWIN_COMPOSE enforces a compositing backend or forces compositing completely off. The following values are supported:
O: OpenGL backend (either OpenGL 1, OpenGL 2 or OpenGL ES 2.0)
O1: OpenGL 1 backend
O2: OpenGL 2 backend
X: XRender backend
N: No Compositing

[hpg]

That was a good one! Messed up my desktop in a very charming fashion!

Currently, I am thinking, that the issue is not related to kwin, but more in the kernel - driver - X server area.

I booted the 3.11.0.8 kernel, which was (as I think) active when everything was running so well. But even
with the 3.11.0.8 kernel, desktop effects could not be enabled.

So do you know, if there is a possiblity to go back to the version from September 30 ? If so, I would go back to that
to examine the situation. I then could compare that to the actual version.

[Rog132]

So do you know, if there is a possiblity to go back to the version from September 30 ? If so, I would go back to that
to examine the situation. I then could compare that to the actual version.

The apt has an option to downgrade the packages: http://www.kubuntuforums.net/archive...p/t-54068.html . The graphical package managers (Muon, Synaptic) have also this option.

If you have the old binary packages available then you could downgrade.