Re: fallback mode vs llvmpipe rendering

[Antoine Jacoutot <ajacoutot gnome org>]

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:05:43AM +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> People are contacting me every now and then about gnome-panel. There are
> several people willing to work on it to improve it, but more with the
> goal of making a "GNOME 2"-like session than a fallback session. So far,
> I've been accepting all contributions, except the ones that make the
> panel go in another direction than the fallback session.

Hi.

I know I don't represent the majority nor the core target of GNOME but anyway... :)
I for one would like to keep the fallback mode a little longer. I have hundreds of (corporate; these are the only one I can have real stats on) users enjoying GNOME 3 in fallback mode on OpenBSD.
I know BSDs aren't of real interest for the GNOME Project but it works amazingly well (on x86, x86-64 and powerpc).
We have people working on llvmpipe/gallium/kms support for OpenBSD but it takes time since we are not a large-scale project.

That said, I agree about the point that the fallback mode is not really tested anymore by upstream developers for obvious reasons; I currently see several weird issues with it. My point being that if the fallback mode would get better love outside of GNOME then why not. I'm just not a fan of the hard dependency on OpenGL for applications outside of gnome-shell: I also run Linux on the side and even there I have many many issues with 3D drivers; and running Fedora with llvmpipe under VMware, while working, is still very slow.

-- 
Antoine