GMA500 vs. G3 software render

[Al Dunsmuir]

On Thursday, May 3, 2012, 1:22:29 PM, Adam Pribyl wrote:
> On Thu, 3 May 2012, Adam Jackson wrote:
>> On 5/3/12 7:36 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:

The world is full of Adams, it appears!

>>> On Thu, 2012-05-03 at 13:21 +0200, Adam Pribyl wrote:
>>>> While I consider the latest development on gma500, present in many Atom
>>>> base netbooks, a great success and would like to say thank you to
>>>> developer(s),
>>
>> When you say "latest development", what exactly are you referring to?
>>

> OK, your "latest development" is probably somewhere else, than mine, I
> meant F16-17 kernel psb->gma500 that made things work somehow out of the
> box.

>>> I don't know if there's a plan to blacklist systems with sufficiently
>>> 'bad' CPU performance from using software rendering, or if ajax is of
>>> the opinion that just about anything should be able to run Shell
>>> acceptably via software rendering and if a system doesn't, there's a bug
>>> that needs fixing...ajax, is there an overview here?
>>
>> I don't currently have such a plan.  I could, I guess.
>>
>> My personal opinion is that Core and up are pretty tolerable and 
>> anything less kind of isn't but also already kind of wasn't.  But I no 
>> longer really have any idea whether my threshold for acceptable 
>> interactivity matches that of anyone else.  Nor do I own any of the

> This you will notice, as letters written on the screen via keyboard are
> lagging behind what you type and gnome-shell is taking 100% cpu on any
> action.

>> non-free Intel kit - on the grounds of not rewarding Intel's duplicity - 
>> so I have no real idea what it's like there either.
>>
>> So if we want to blacklist low performers, okay, that's a thing we can 
>> do I suppose.  Where do we draw the line?

> I am not sure the blacklisting gets a wider support, thou just ideas:

> 1. if software render is enabled and CPU is less then Core 
> (if you meant Intel Core) or AMD Athlon, use fallback.

Since  Gnome  development is pressing for fallback to be removed, this
will eventually no longer be an alternative.

I've  using  Gnome  3 fallback on older Radeon hardware. I've tried to
upgrade  beyond  9200 SE level GPU, but am now hitting limitation with
the  power  supply  in  the  smaller  desktops  (AGP 8X) I am using as
limited  servers (DNS, DHCP, Samba).

The  reason I hopped on this thread is that the older cards that I was
using  use  the R100 driver, and these newer ones use the R2xx driver.
Both are currently blacklisted by Gnome 3.

Since  there  was  news  that  the ancient ATI Rage was updated to use
current acceleration, one hope is that the R2xx drives will eventually
follow suit.

I owe Ajax some BZs, I suspect.

> 2. ask testers during the test period and testdays to report

Very  subjective.   Better  to  have  an  easy-to-use  X configuration
control.

> 2a. measure difference between g3 sofware render and fallback (via 
> x11perf?)
> 2b. check the cpu load caused by process ghome-shell during some simple
> action like window gnome-terminal switching is higher than 50% for some
> time?