[olug] Laptop Options 2 --- Using Intel graphics with Compiz.

[Travis Watkins]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 9:31 AM, Nate Moseman  wrote:
>  Oh, and the Intel driver was not on the Compiz black list, It was on
>  Ubuntu's compiz blacklist because Ubuntu shipped somewhat broken
>  drivers.
>
>  I've been enjoying Compiz on Intel graphics for quite some time.

Bzzt, wrong. [1] shows that this is blacklisted in the compiz-manager
script (which Ubuntu helped to create and uses) because EXA _sucks_.
It absolutely kills performance. Doesn't matter what driver version
you use, you absolutely must use the kernel drm from the 2.6.25-rc
kernels in order to get acceptable EXA in a standard setup. That
certainly wasn't available for Ubuntu 7.10 (and isn't for Ubuntu 8.04
either) so there was no way to use it.

For 8.04 we have a little trick we use to work around this. Basically
we still use EXA but set MigrationHeuristic to greedy so that almost
all rendering happens in software just like it did with XAA. This
makes EXA only slightly slower than XAA but gives us working Xv with
compiz.

So, basically, you might be enjoying Compiz and Xv on your 965 but I
bet you're not enjoying scrolling in Firefox (or doing most anything
else that involves painting lots of text).

[1] http://wiki.compiz-fusion.org/Hardware/Blacklist
- --
Travis Watkins
http://www.realistanew.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFHwfUhz0yOB+e3rGsRAoIrAJ0VxEyTJJrTSEV3UI8gsGGCuVm6RACfdRL7
d5CgMJv+3jsJwEcp7GPt1TQ=
=h6OS
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----