[gentoo-user] Re: Anyone using xfce4 with compositing turned off? [FIXED]

[walt]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 20:08:55 -0400
Fernando Rodriguez <frodriguez.developer@×××××××.com> wrote:

> On Sunday, August 23, 2015 2:25:47 PM walt wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 05:53:37 +0200
> > bitlord <bitlord0xff@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Sat, 2015-08-22 at 19:08 -0700, walt wrote:
> >
> > > > I forgot about xf86-video-ati until you mentioned it, so I just
> > > > emerged
> > > > it and (I think) made all the changes needed to reconfigure
> > > > Xorg to use
> > > > it instead of fglrx.
> > > >
> > > > Maybe I'm just too tired right now to think straight, but the
> > > > error messages I see in Xorg.log tell me that my video chip is
> > > > not supported.
> >
> > > For radeon (free driver) you need to configure more than Xorg,
> > > check wiki article about radeon driver [1], It needs in kernel
> > > support, also most cards especially "newer" (>=r600) need
> > > proprietary firmware.
> > >
> > >
> > > [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Radeon
> >
> > An excellent wiki page, thanks.  It tells me that my video chip
> > should be supported so I'll go back and follow all the steps this
> > time.  I'd like to avoid the proprietary ati driver if I can.
>
> I had nothing but trouble with the free driver with a kabini APU.
> Hibernate would give a black screen on resume. The "Dim screen after
> an inactive period" (whatever it's called) would dim it further until
> the backlight turns off everytime the period elapses. And a lot of
> programs like the adobe flash plugin and other players, and games
> would show video that I may have watched even days before but it's
> still on video memory when started.

Ironically, the free driver works better than the proprietary driver on
this (desktop) machine.  The high CPU usage with xfwm4 is fixed and all
other video-related functions (like playing video files) work as well
as they did before.

Power-saving features like the ones used by your kabini introduce a
huge amount of complexity -- I'm amazed that anyone ever got the free
driver to work with those chips.  The only way I got it to work on this
machine was to ignore all those dozens of optional steps in the wiki
and use the simplest possible configuration -- still so complex that I
gave up last night in frustration.  This morning brought me better luck.

> The only problem I've had with the proprietary driver (which may be
> realted to your problem) is that if you use a premptive kernel it
> causes a LOT of errors to be written to the syslog which makes the
> desktop very unresponsive. That's because it calls functions that
> should not be called with preemption enabled. If that's your problem
> you'll see errors on the syslog and I posted a patch that disables
> preemption before calling those functions. It's on a VLC bug (cause
> at first I tought it was a VLC related) and I recently noticed that I
> still get the errors if I switch between X sessions with CTRL-ALT-Fx
> so it's incomplete but it makes things much better. I will update it
> and post it on the right bug when I get around it.

The reason I use mpv instead of VLC is that the video performance is
better on this machine.  Now that I'm using a different driver I'll
give VLC another try.

BTW thanks for submitting the bug fixes.