[Test-Announce] Test Day 2012-03-29: GNOME Shell Software Rendering

[Kamil Paral]

There will be a "GNOME Shell Software Rendering" Test Day on Thursday!

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R...

Here's an introduction from Vitezslav Humpa, who's in charge of this event from QA
perspective:

This week brings a second installment of Fedora Test Day targeting GNOME 3. This time we
will focus on software rendering providing a full GNOME session purely by means of the
CPU. Nowadays with most of personal computers capable of hardware 3D acceleration this
might seem unnecessary. But let's not forget a whole lot of us who have capable but
yet unsupported hardware and get stuck with the Fallback mode.

And this is not the only case. In addition to computers with obsolete graphics there are
VM hypervisors like KVM or VirtualBox that don't support full 3D yet. Fedora can also
run on many kinds of less usual devices like tablets or netbooks that don't have free
(or even proprietary) drivers ready.

Simply said, our goal is to make sure that no matter what hardware you are running your
Fedora on, you will always get the user experience you are entitled to - a full GNOME
desktop.

Do you have an older PC? Netbook? Or do you like to play with the latest of the latest in
VM, where it won't "break" your computer? Even if not, please help us test
the GNOME Shell software rendering by following few test cases and catching a few bugs -
after all, as always with Fedora, you'll be doing that for yourself :-)


Date: 2012-03-29
Time: all day
What: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R...
Where: #fedora-test-day
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[Adam Jackson]

On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 08:25 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
>  There will be a "GNOME Shell Software Rendering" Test Day
> on Thursday!
>  
>  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R... 
I've updated the "How to test" section with more details on exactly what
kind of coverage I'm looking for:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R...

Please let me know if there's anything I can clarify there.

- ajax

[John Reiser]

> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R...
>  
>  Please let me know if there's anything I can clarify there. 
Please give the next level of detail in "Testing older video cards may require
creating
and editing xorg.conf, or moving the DRI drivers for those cards out of the way to force
fallback to llvmpipe."  Two explicit examples, or pointers to tools, would be nice.

I have Radeon 9250 Pro [RV280] which today gets fallback mode on Pentium 4 with sse2.
My skills with xorg.conf are rusty [see how successful "no xorg.conf" has
been!],
and "moving drivers out of the way" is nebulous.

--

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 09:01 -0700, John Reiser wrote:
>  >
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Day:2012-03-29_Gnome_Shell_Software_R...
>  > 
>  > Please let me know if there's anything I can clarify there.
>  
>  Please give the next level of detail in "Testing older video cards may require
> creating
>  and editing xorg.conf, or moving the DRI drivers for those cards out of the way to force
>  fallback to llvmpipe."  Two explicit examples, or pointers to tools, would be nice.
>  
>  I have Radeon 9250 Pro [RV280] which today gets fallback mode on Pentium 4 with sse2.
>  My skills with xorg.conf are rusty [see how successful "no xorg.conf" has
> been!],
>  and "moving drivers out of the way" is nebulous. 
Yeah, that's completely impenetrable to someone who doesn't already know
what it means. =)

I guess we're talking about an xorg.conf with "Accel" "Off",
right?
(Does that disable 3D acceleration?) Remember we have xorg.conf.d
snippets, now - can we provide some such snippets ready-made for use on
the test day page?

'moving dri drivers out of the way' is referring to the files in
libdir/dri . What I have there is:

/usr/lib64/dri/i915_dri.so - early intel (rename this to test blacklisted intel chips)
/usr/lib64/dri/i965_dri.so - late intel
/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_dri.so - late nouveau
/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_vieux_dri.so - early nouveau (rename this to test old nvidia
chips)
/usr/lib64/dri/r200_dri.so - early radeon (rename this to test blacklisted radeon chips)
/usr/lib64/dri/r300_dri.so - mid radeon
/usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so - late radeon
/usr/lib64/dri/radeon_dri.so - is this really really old radeon?
/usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so - software rendering?
/usr/lib64/dri/vmwgfx_dri.so - vmware passthrough?

so specifically, if you have an old blacklisted Intel chip, you can
move /usr/lib64/dri/i915_dri.so out of the way in order to try it with
software rendering. If you have an old blacklisted Radeon chip, you can
move /usr/lib64/dri/r200_dri.so or possibly /usr/lib64/dri/radeon_dri.so
out of the way to test it. If you have an old (not blacklisted, we
didn't blacklist them yet, but some of them are pretty wonky at running
shell) NVIDIA chip, you can move /usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_vieux_dri.so out
of the way to try it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net