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List:       kwin
Subject:    Re: ideas to potentially share some effort
From:       Benoit Jacob <jacob.benoit.1 () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-12-14 19:08:51
Message-ID: AANLkTikpw878oMR_6igHenn9WtoiMLLsyR3jXsrzF9PG () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi Martin,
Thanks for the answers,

2010/12/14 Martin Gräßlin <kde@martin-graesslin.com>:
>> 1. What I'd like to get from you
>>
>> Do you have a good device / driver blacklist/whitelist ?
> No we don't have a blacklist or 4.5 would not have been so painful. We
> nowadays have a platform detection [1] which could be of help for you.

Thanks, but it seems that you're getting the graphics card info from
glGetString which requires to have a OpenGL context in the first
place. In our experience, crashy drivers may crash already when
creating a OpenGL context, so we need to find another way. I think we
can query X directly for that.

>> We're
>> currently not enabling hardware acceleration by default in Firefox 4
>> on X11 because we're scared of the status of drivers (and being a
>> browser, we shouldn't risk crashing).
> I'd recommend to just enable it by default. The crashes and problems in the
> driver stack will never get fixed if apps don't demand the functionality.
> Firefox 4 will go into the next distro round which will require more OpenGL
> functionality. Both GNOME Shell and Unity depend on OpenGL. So at least Ubuntu
> and Fedora will need it. In general it's not your problem at all. It's the
> task of the distribution to bundle the software in a way that it works. They
> have to ensure that the drivers are not broken!

Unfortunately, we have to be much more conservative than that, for at
least three reasons:
 - our users are non-technical and value 'just works' above new features
 - driver bugs may include security issues.
 - browsers actually turn crashes into DOS security issues (if e.g. JS
may trigger the crash).

>> Having a good
>> blacklist/whitelist would allow us to turn opengl features on at least
>> certain X11 setups.
> If you want to go the easy way, enable for NVIDIA, disable for anything else.
> Though that's not nice from an OpenSource developer point of view.

That's what I was afraid of. Yes, the NVIDIA proprietary driver works
for us. I guess that's better than nothing.

Cheers,
Benoit
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