A question about "Software rendering for gnome-shell"

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:13:19AM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 23:52 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > I am asking because on my rawhide installation
> > (Radeon RV280 graphics card) I am surely not observing anything of that
> > sort.

> Yeah, ugly corner case.
.....
> 
> Mind testing the following scratch builds to see if they give you shell
> on llvmpipe?
> 
> http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/scratch/ajax/task_3807698/
> http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/scratch/ajax/task_3807716/

I replaced my existing packages with these and as a result I get
a consistent segfault from /usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated-helper
every time I am trying to start a gnome-session and this drops me into
a fallback mode.  Pretty quickly, I would say, which is definitely a
plus. :-)

After installing a corresponding gnome-session-debuginfo I do not see
very much with gdb from a generated core:

Core was generated by `/usr/libexec/gnome-session-check-accelerated-helper'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
....
(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007f423f4fb349 in ?? ()
#1  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

True, gdb suggests a long list of other "debuginfo" packages but I have
some doubts if this would help that much.

Running 'LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome-shell --replace', as proposed by
drago01, indeed starts an intended mode gnome session, both before and
after installing these scratch packages, but results are spectacularly
useless. 'gnome-shells' eats whatever CPU it can get so one can look at
results but no hope of doing anything useful.

OTOH sawfish-1.8.91-3.fc17 over a "Gnome classic" session works just great. :-)

   Michal