Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

[kubicle]

Is anyone using radeon (open source driver) with karmic?

After the latest upgrades to radeon and drm, I lost desktop effects (with kwin) on my thinkpad (with an older radeon mobility card). The desktop effects were running very well prior to the upgrade. And everything is also fine without desktop effects.

The strange thing is that direct rendering is still working (and there are no problems running glxgears either...and no errors in xorg logs).

Before making a bug report, I'd like to hear if anybody else is seeing this...or is it just my setup?

[Nate B.]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

So far my experience has been exactly the opposite on a TP T41 which lspci reports as:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

I had desktop effects disabled and after updating on Monday morning 24 Aug, everything Plasma was a mess including the panel and window decorations. Fortunately, the start menu and anything inside an application was still visible. This morning I updated again and the mess was still there even after rebooting into kernel 2.6.31-7-686. So I was able to get into the system configuration and enabled desktop effects which restored the panel and window decorations.

I am using the Xorg supplied Radeon driver as well as the Radeon framebuffer to fix the power-on problem on suspend.

[kubicle]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

Thanks for the information, I have a t41 as well, but with a RV250 chip (Mobility FireGL 9000)...so it seems it could be a chipset specific thing.

I'll have to dig around a bit more.

[Fintan]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

With my ATI radeon 9250 pro running default drivers desktop effects are not usable.

I get a black screen with my panels then a complete plasma crash.

Relogin does not help either.

[kubicle]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

I get a black screen with my panels then a complete plasma crash.

Sounds similar to my symptoms.

I got desktop effects working with newer drivers from a ppa (I think it was the KMS drivers... I tried so many I can't be sure though), but these were unusable because of other issues (badly corrupted graphics).

I'll let you know if I find a fix.

[kbunt]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

Thanks for the information, I have a t41 as well, but with a RV250 chip (Mobility FireGL 9000)...so it seems it could be a chipset specific thing.

I'll have to dig around a bit more.

Have you tried Ubuntu with your Thinkpad? In Ubuntu, Karmic 9.10, Alpha 6, the entire system locks up. You have to power on and off. Ironically, Kubuntu's Karmic 9.10 Alpha 5 or 6 is fine in comparison.

[kubicle]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

Have you tried Ubuntu with your Thinkpad?

I haven't (I was pretty sure it is a kernel/driver/xorg issue, and likely to affect all 3D desktops).

In Ubuntu, Karmic 9.10, Alpha 6, the entire system locks up.

I'd suspect that is compiz (IIRC compiz doesn't have a 'desktop effects off' mode that does not need 3d), ubuntu should work with metacity (unless there are other problems as well)

I haven't really focused on this, as I can manage just fine without desktop effects, but I'll go digging around a bit later.

[kbunt]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

Interesting. It looks like Metacity is involved or a part of the problem then. I wasn't really even familiar with it but I looked it up (via Google). I also read the Ubuntu documentation on it.

When I change the settings in Metacity such as opening the Appearance Preferences applet and changing Visual Effects to 'None' then I avoid the hard lockup. Is this turning Metacity off?

I tested this on the Live CD and everything is fine unless I change that setting to anything else that uses a desktop effect.

[kubicle]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

When I change the settings in Metacity such as opening the Appearance Preferences applet and changing Visual Effects to 'None' then I avoid the hard lockup. Is this turning Metacity off?

Metacity is gnome's default window manager (similar to kwin in KDE). And the problem seems to only affect desktop effects (which needs 3d compositing), both metacity and kwin should work without desktop effects enabled.

AFAIK you cannot turn desktop effects off in compiz (which is an alternative window manager that one can use instead of metacity or kwin) and so it's probably not going to work either.

So currently the workaround is using either metacity (in gnome) or kwin (kde) and turning the effects off.

[claydoh]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

So far my experience has been exactly the opposite on a TP T41 which lspci reports as:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

I had desktop effects disabled and after updating on Monday morning 24 Aug, everything Plasma was a mess including the panel and window decorations. Fortunately, the start menu and anything inside an application was still visible. This morning I updated again and the mess was still there even after rebooting into kernel 2.6.31-7-686. So I was able to get into the system configuration and enabled desktop effects which restored the panel and window decorations.

I am using the Xorg supplied Radeon driver as well as the Radeon framebuffer to fix the power-on problem on suspend.

I thought I was the only one with this, I find it strange that you have to enable effects to get windecos and plasma widgets to be visible :/. I have the same video chipset in my Compaq Evo N610. I am getting seriously high cpu usage from xorg right now, and it is often slowing everything to a crawl

[kubicle]

Re: Radeon upgrades and desktop effects

I managed to get my desktop effects back by increasing AGPSize option in xorg.conf for the radeon driver (Option "AGPSize" "32")...so I'm guessing the newer radeon/mesa drivers need more texture memory for the effects?

(Another possible "fix" would probably be a combination of DepthBits/AGPSize options)

I'm still experiencing some graphical glitches, and the effects do not feel as snappy as with the older drivers (but maybe these are just bugs in the drivers), but the effects are definitely usable.