Re: Dropping fallback mode in 3.8

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 21/11/12 20:11, David King wrote:
> However llvmpipe doesn't currently work on some architectures (ppc,
> s390, arm?--ARM (hf) works-shawnl)

Debian is perhaps a useful source here, since we have more
architectures than most (any?) other distributions.

It seems we currently only build the llvmpipe driver on i386 and x86-64
(including non-Linux kernels on those architectures, though). I'm sure
the Debian Mesa maintainers would appreciate successful test reports for
other platforms: a comment in the packaging indicates that they're only
limiting llvmpipe to x86 because nobody has confirmed that it works
elsewhere.

I can confirm that under kvm virtualization on a modern laptop (Lenovo
X220, using spice to display graphics in virt-manager), GNOME 3.6 uses
fallback mode by default, but when forced to try Shell mode
(gnome.fallback=0 on kernel command line), performance is
fine (~ 15 fps). On the other hand, the Gallium swrast driver (not
llvmpipe) on the same setup is not really usable (~ 1 fps).

Shell performance is not our only problem with modern GNOME and
non-llvmpipe software rendering: there have been reports that
applications using Clutter (e.g. Empathy with libchamplain) just don't
start. (<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=619636>)

    S