On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:02:19 -0500 Kristopher John Gamrat chaotickjg@gmail.com 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@gmail.com 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.