[kde-linux] Re: Panel widgets alwais to the left

[Alex Schuster]

Duncan writes:

> Alex Schuster posted on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:49:01 +0200 as excerpted:
> 
>> KMS, right... another thing to try. So I did, I built an identical
>> kernel, except that KMS was off. BTW, is there an option to toggle
>> this by a boto parameter, like 'nomodeset' to diable the gallium stuff?
> 
> There is, assuming "boto" means boot...
> 
> Actually, nomodeset is it, AFAIK.  That turns of kernel-modesetting.  I 
> believe a side effect would be turning off gallium as well, since AFAIK, 
> gallium requires kernel modesetting (not userspace), but as you can likely 
> deduce from the parameter itself, nomodeset as a kernel parameter tells 
> the kernel not to modeset, therefore, no kms, ums (user-modesetting) 
> instead.

Yes, I got it wrong. KMS is deactivated with nomodeset, while I toggle
gallium usage for the various drivers with Gentoo's 'eselect mesa' command.

I made progress. Tried KMS again, that is, without nomodeset kernel
parameter. And with a new kernel, where I deselected all framebuffer
stuff I could. there was not much activated, only vga16 I think.
This time, I got no crash at startup. Instead, I got a nice small font
instead of the normal text mode. Nice!

I had some weird effects. Like, after X started, I switched back to the
text console, and no longer had the small font console, but a screenshot
of how it looked just before the mode switched. This went away after a
little switching to and back from X.

Compositing was disabled, because of missing firmware. I had to install
x11-drivers/radeon-ucode and enable some firmware options in the kernel
(mnore detail in the bug report [*]), and now it is working. With less
CPU usage for X than I had with the fglrx driver. Working KDE desktop
effects, and no crashes.

One problem remains: Quake3 is very slow, so opengl acceleration does
not work correctly yet. That's bad, Quake3 is about the only game I
play, but at least I have no graphics corruption like with Xorg 1.7, no
crashes, no memory problem like with fglrx.

> Since unlike kms/ums, the difference between gallium and classic but kms 
> drivers is entirely X config, that can be set after boot, from userspace, 
> while kms cannot.  Presumably, you'd have xorg.conf.d (or xorg.conf if pre 
> xorg-server-1.8 or if you prefer it) settings for both gallium and classic 
> drivers, using only the single driver line in the device section to switch 
> between them.  That could be done via sed in a script, if you want to be 
> able to run either one, and that in turn controlled by a kernel 
commandline 
> option if you wanted to set it at boot and then boot directly into X and a 
> *dm instead of using the CLI login and startx, as I do here.

Hmm, is there anything I have to enable for gallium to be used? I
thought with Gentoo I only have to 'eselect mesa 64bit r600 gallium'? Seems 
so, glxinfo reports Gallium being used or not, according to what I set. But 
it makes no difference here.

	Wonko