Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 04:20:01 GMT From: Matthew Rezny <mrezny@hexaneinc.com> To: freebsd-x11@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware rendering Message-ID: <201308280420.r7S4K1OM083764@freefall.freebsd.org>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
The following reply was made to PR ports/156405; it has been noted by GNATS. From: Matthew Rezny <mrezny@hexaneinc.com> To: bug-followup@FreeBSD.org Cc: Subject: Re: ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware rendering Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:56:45 +0200 This is a very puzzling problem that really irks me. I had perfectly working R600 DRI on very similar hardware (HD4870) as well as a laptop with similar video (HD4200), but some Xorg update at least a year ago killed it. Why the regression without any apparent attempt to fix? The last it worked properly was the point in time when setting WITHOUT_NOVEAU allowed r600_dri.so to be compiled. All worked perfect and the newer Xorg brings no new features from a user point of view, only new problems. I could almost understand if there was some actual problem with the R600 DRI, but there isn't. Starting X results in the software rasterizer, which makes KDE painfully slow . However, running certain apps I get hardware rendering. i.e. OpenArena loads r600_dri.so instead of swrast and the framerate in timedemo clearly slows hardware rendering is in fact working. Why can a game get hardware rendering but the rest of X can't? Considering how far off KMS support is, I would hope this issue would have been addressed by now. From my viewpoint, it looks like some stupid and likely trivial bug that causes Xorg to load swrast instead of r600_dri, but I haven't the time nor patience to dig through the mess that is Xorg to attempt to figure it out. Considering the recent suggestion of flipping the WITH_NEW_XORG switch, which itself is very ambiguous, I must re-iterate a previous suggestion: Instead of having a single set of ports for Xorg, PLEASE make some versioned ports for the older versions. This would allow the "legacy" hardware (as in what I think most of us are actually using) to continue to function in a useful fashion. Considering the precedent of version-named ports (e.g. postgresql, mysql, bdb, etc), I cannot fathom why this is not done for Xorg/DRI/Mesa.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?201308280420.r7S4K1OM083764>