This is the mail archive of the cygwin-xfree mailing list for the Cygwin XFree86 project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: X hardware acceleration still flaky?


On 08/08/2010 15:57, L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk wrote:
Hi Jon,

I just downloaded the current X server and its libraries in the Cygwin distro; the xwin-gl allusion came from the previous thread I mentioned.

So, the current problem is with OpenGL on X.


"OpenGL" and "hardware acceleration" are not synonyms.

Testing with the experimental AIGLX code is moot if it doesn't work with the current X server.

Compiling geomview 1.9.4 --with-opengl is straightforward (that's one improvement on pre-7.4 X; configure doesn't get confused about X library locations and building is easier). I then tried running savi with geomview:
- using OpenGL. 30 seconds of slow flickering (slow enough to be the software rendering that you alluded to?), then the X server consistently crashes, even before I've had a chance to turn on texturemapping...

I've built savi and geomview, and I'm afraid I can't reproduce this crash.


There's no flickering unless I use the mouse to rotate the planet, which almost looks like it's not using double-buffering for some reason, as the whole frame looks like it's being drawn into the front buffer...


I've rebuilt X server 1.8.2-1 with debugging symbols and uploaded it at [1], can you run that under gdb and reproduce your crash and post a backtrace, please.


[1] ftp://cygwin.com/pub/cygwinx/XWin.20100808-git-66f3680cb47fbd09.exe.bz2

- forcing internal geomview software rendering using geomview -noopengl -run ../savi1.4.3/savi $* . Works, but is rather stately. No texturemapping support, obviously. Less slow than the brief opengl attempt, though, which figures given that doing OpenGL in software imposes more layers of overhead?

That's the status from testing with what cygwin ships at the moment. I haven't tried your older binaries. Please let me know when you get to another test release, and I'll try it out.

thanks,

L.

SaVi satellite constellation visualization http://savi.sf.net/

On 8 Aug 2010, at 13:57, Jon TURNEY wrote:

On 08/08/2010 10:18, L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk wrote:
Well, it's been eighteen months since I last asked:
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2009-02/msg00259.html

so I attempted to use opengl hardware acceleration with Cygwin and XFree 7.4, using Geomview (www.geomview.org) as the test application on an uptodate Cygwin 1.7 install.

Lots of flickering for about thirty seconds (of correct output), but then the X server crashes. So, no visible change over previous. It's still a regression on pre-7.4.

I'm not sure what you were testing here, but I can't see how it could be hardware AIGLX.

xwin-gl is obsolete, an empty package since R7.4 [1], so if you are running
that somehow, it must be an old version, which I am surprised works at all.

Alternatively, you are using xwin with software rendering, and your
application exposes some bug in the Xserver which makes it crash.


I am happy to work with you to resolve these issues.


Has any work been attempted on improving hardware acceleration in xwin-gl?

Yes, this is something I have been working on in my copious free time(TM):


http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2009-06/msg00088.html
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin-xfree/2009-08/msg00021.html
http://x.cygwin.com/devel/todo.html

I hope you'll note that savi is one of the applications I've been testing with.

However, given the lack of response so far, it seems that you and me are the
only 2 people interested in working AIGLX for XWin :-)

I wouldn't suggest testing with those binaries at this stage, as I've moved on
a bit.  I hope to shortly make another test release containing AIGLX based on
the upcoming Xserver 1.9, and I would very much appreciate some testing of the
AIGLX functionality in that, when it is available.

[1] http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=xwin-gl

-- Jon TURNEY Volunteer Cygwin/X X Server maintainer

--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://x.cygwin.com/docs/
FAQ:                   http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]