On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:02:19 -0500
Kristopher John Gamrat <chaotickjg@...> wrote:

> On Monday 13 February 2012 12:10:05 am /dev/ammo42 wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:32:04 -0500
> > Kristopher John Gamrat <chaotickjg@...> wrote:
> > > > There is a FOSS radeon driver for which some developers at AMD
> > > > are paid to work on it, and on my experience it works OK both
> > > > for light 3D games and KDE4 compositing (even better than AMD
> > > > proprietary driver for the latter). And compared to Intel
> > > > drivers I've almost never seen it crash.
> > > 
> > > I'm using an Intel card right now (same one since December 2009)
> > > with the FOSS Intel driver. I've never seen any crash cause by
> > > the driver, all crashes thus far were either a glitch in some
> > > program that overloaded my CPU, or from overheating (though this
> > > usually leads to a kernel panic rather than an X.org crash).
> > > 
> > > Of course, I rarely run anything that requires 3D acceleration.
> > I have driver crashes:
> > -under Slackware 13.1, as soon as I enable KDE 4.4's KWin effects.
> > (I use Mesa 7.7.1 as 7.8.1 has a severe performance regression with
> > StepMania)
> > -under Slackware 13.1, after too many cycles of suspend/resume
> > (highly variable)
> > -under Slackware 13.37, when using KDE 4.5 with or without KWin
> > effects, after at least a half dozen of hours (highly variable)
> > -under Slackware 13.37, when I play a Xv-accelerated video, then
> > open an OpenGL game, then close it when the video is still playing
> > (often)
> > 
> > On my AMD laptop, with FOSS drivers, I can simultaneously have KWin
> > effects, play a video and launch a 3D game without any crash and
> > with reasonable preformance.
> 
> Have you tried your Intel card on any distro but Slackware? Also,
> have you tried any desktop besides KDE4? It might be a glitch in one
> of the Slackware packages (either a recompile of the driver or trying
> on another distro could tell), or one of the glitches in KDE4 (I seem
> to remember having a lot of crashes in KDE 4 on several different
> cards, though I haven't used it since 4.6 and I hear that 4.8 is
> supposed to be fairly stable). I never got around to trying out
> Slackware, so I wouldn't be able to test the driver or KDE 4 from
> within Slackware on my machine.
Actually on Slackware 13.1 I already changed versions of:
-xf86-video-intel: 2.11.0 to 2.9.1, because 2.11.0 is unusable with
Trinity and KDE 3.5.10
-Mesa: 7.8.1 to 7.7.1 because 7.8.1 has a huge performance regression
with one of the OpenGL games I play
so I know that they are built from pristine sources.
In general Slackware applies very few patches to upstream sources.
> 
> Purely for comparison purposes, on my Debian Squeeze install, Intel
> driver, Intel Mobile Series 4 Integrated Chipset (includes my video
> card, as is usually the case with Intel): -I never tried any of the
> special KWin effects in any KDE version, nor Compiz (never really
> cared much for eye-candy) -I can suspend to RAM and resume countless
> times without problems aside from impatient programs that don't want
> to wait for my network manager to reconnect ;-) (I never tried
> suspend to disk) -I can run my computer full-power almost the entire
> day without a crash (unless you count the random crashes the occur if
> I inadvertently block the fan). -I've never heard of Xv-accelerated
> videos before, though on many occasions, I've had a lot of stuff
> running at once (including either a DVD or Youtube video) when my
> screen saver activates, and a few of those times, it was one of the
> OpenGL screen savers.
Xv is basically the acceleration every video player is using to rescale
the videos and/or do RGV->YUV conversions.
But apparently you don't have the same generation of Intel hardware
since I have a Core i3.
>