Re: Desktop slowness issue - freeze break request

[Elijah Newren <newren gmail com>]

On 8/31/05, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com> wrote:

[snip]
> I argue in the bug why the omission of these redraws is safe, but even
> if you don't believe that such a change can at most cause redraw issues
> which are not very serious.
>
> This patch probably doesn't remove all the slowdowns caused by this
> apparent X slowness issue, but it at least makes it better by limiting
> its scope. And it should help everyone, since these desktop redraws are
> just generally a waste of time, even on systems where its not very slow.
>
> Is this ok to commit?
[snip]

This doesn't seem to be a regression, so maybe it can wait for 2.12.1. I
also don't see anybody confirming that it fixes the issue for them.

In my reading of the bug report, it looks like it is a regression caused by an Xorg bug triggered by cairo and this patch is just an attempted workaround.  Did I misread?

I don't think this patch would have any unintended side-effects so it should be safe, but I'd be rather surprised if it actually helped.  There was a comment in the bug that the problem was painful for focus-follows-mouse, but if they're using Metacity, the desktop window is never focused in any focus mode unless the user clicks on it:

    case EnterNotify:
       <snip>
          switch (meta_prefs_get_focus_mode ())
            {
            case META_FOCUS_MODE_SLOPPY:
            case META_FOCUS_MODE_MOUSE:
              if (window->type != META_WINDOW_DOCK &&
                  window->type != META_WINDOW_DESKTOP)
                {
                  meta_topic (META_DEBUG_FOCUS,
                              "Focusing %s due to enter notify

Now, perhaps they're using a different window manager, or perhaps
they're clicking on the desktop enough for this to cause problems, but
the Mandriva bug Frederic linked to in that report suggested that
mapping any new windows was causing problems, which means that closing
windows is likely to have the same problem, and that's one you probably
can't avoid--it may, in fact, be the problem.

So, although the patch looks safe enough to me, I'd really rather see if it actually helped anyone first.