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.
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.
--
Kris Gamrat
Ark Linux webmaster
http://www.arklinux.org/
Attachments: