Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 08:24 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le samedi 03 avril 2010 à 23:41 -0400, Owen Taylor a écrit : 
> > >       * Radeon KMS drivers are very slow (too slow to run gnome-shell,
> > >         at least) and still stabilizing. 
> > 
> > Almost since the beginning 18 months ago, my personal gnome-shell
> > development has been done on an ancient Radeon rv350 with KMS drivers.
> > Not sure where your information is coming from.
> 
> It’s first-hand: 
> 01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RS690 [Radeon X1200 Series]

As I recall, the RS690 is a bit of an odd-ball part. It's IGP (unified
memory) and in many ways is more like a r400 than a r600. So, it's
likely to trigger bugs and problems that other cards might not
experience. However, it has plenty of raw horsepower for the needs of
the shell.

> I’m running a very recent kernel+driver combination, and anything that
> uses Clutter is still slow as hell.

If anything that uses Clutter is slow, you have some very narrow
specific bug that can be fixed. And if it's "slow as hell" it should be
quite easy to track down because whatever is going wrong will likely
stick up like a lighthouse in profiles. Drop into #radeon on FreeNode at
some point, and the people there will be happy to help you
investigate it.

> > >       * Non-free drivers are terribly lagging behind in terms of
> > >         non-core functionality (RandR? Ha, ha, ha.) 
> > 
> > Not GNOME's problem.
> 
> It is, if you want to take into account such functionality for the core
> desktop experience. Users already have to use different tools depending
> on their hardware, only to switch resolutions.

Let me phrase it a little differently then - it's not a problem that
GNOME is able to fix. If there is demand, I assume NVIDIA will work on
xrandr support.

> Since one of your suggested workarounds for the non-working free drivers
> is to use non-free drivers, you’d better check first whether that
> affects other pieces of the desktop.

I think it's much closer to the GNOME 3 experience to have the desktop
working as expected except for configuring your graphics card rather
than having the graphics card configuration working as expected but not
to have the rest.

- Owen