So long, xorg-edgers...

[HalationEffect]

... and thanks for all the crashes.

I've been using the xorg-edgers PPA on my Kubuntu 12.04 (Precise) system with Intel Sandybridge graphics up until today, and to say that there have been issues with flakiness would be quite the understatement.

Here's a breakdown of the problems I've had with it over the last year or so:

Activity	Frequency of problems	Severity of problems
General desktop use, compositing	Very rare	Minor (had to switch from SNA to UXA for a few days)
Video playback (Mplayer, VLC, etc.)	Always / Rare	Minor / moderate (annoying tearing / crashes that were usually recoverable without rebooting)
Flash video playback	Uncommon	Minor to moderate (Flash plugin crash, screenful of text, usually recoverable without rebooting)
Flash gaming	Occasional	Minor to moderate (same as for Flash video, but happened more often, less chance of recovery without rebooting)
OpenGL gaming	Common	Moderate to severe (ranging from graphical corruption to kernel panics)

That was the state of play up until today's round of updates, when after a reboot (I usually reboot after installing graphics driver updates) compositing no longer worked and I got a crash notification upon booting up. Something to do with kwin_opengl_test. Running glxinfo would also cause a crash, as would running KInfoCentre and navigating to Graphical Information -> OpenGL.

Losing compositing was the last straw for me; hello ppa-purge and goodbye xorg-edgers. I'm just thankful that ppa-purge now properly supports multiarch, because not so long ago it didn't. The only thing I'll miss from xorg-edgers is S3TC support in Mesa... apparently the patent on S3TC won't expire for another 3 or 4 years.

In summary, I really can't recommend xorg-edgers on Sandybridge hardware in 12.04. YMMV.

[whatthefunk]

I gave up on that one a long time ago. Has much fun as it was booting to a black screen once a month, it just wasnt for me.

[SteveRiley]

Which kernel(s) were you using during your Xorg-Edgers trials? Occasionally, kernels seem to come and go from the Xorg-Edgers PPA, but I've not usually used them. For some time now, my normal way to roll is with Xorg-Edgers and the latest non-RC mainline kernel. This does mean I'm running without Ubuntu-specific patches for X, Mesa, and the kernel. Perhaps that's a good thing, and may be the reason why I can say I've not encountered any of the problems you describe.

Or... WORKSFORME NOTABUG

[HalationEffect]

To be honest, I didn't pay all that much attention to which kernels I was running - it would have been whatever kernels Xorg-Edgers provided for Precise users.

Most of the time things worked reasonably well (as long as I wasn't trying to play an OpenGL game, which would almost guarantee that some kind of crash would happen) with the exception of the tearing issue when watching videos, which was always present (regardless of playback mechanism, eg. VLC, Mplayer, Gstreamer, Flash).

If I enabled Vsync in Desktop Effects -> Advanced, the tearing would still occur, but at a fixed position roughly 20% below the top of the video window (or ~20% below the top of the screen when in full-screen view). My hypothesis is that although Vsync was working, its timing was just a bit off.

The lesson I've taken away from all this is: "if you want a close shave with the cutting edge, keep a styptic pencil handy".