KDE Plasma 5 Problem Traced To Bug In Intel Graphics Driver 56
prisoninmate writes with news that certain complaints about the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment may not be KDE's fault at all:
Apparently, KDE Plasma 5 runs just fine, and the issue is related to a serious Intel Graphics Driver Stack bug. The good news is that a workaround for the bug is already available, and it requires you to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf file from your Linux kernel-based operating system, by switching back to the older UXA acceleration method instead of the default SNA method used in many distros.
SystemD (Score:2, Funny)
Some of have SystemD and don't have /etc/X11, you insensitive clod!
Re:SystemD (Score:4, Funny)
what is this mysterious "/etc" everyone is talking about? the systemd nightlies don't have this. is it part of the deprecated "directory" system?
Re: (Score:1)
Intriguing. Where do I find it?
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I usually use systemdedit, its a pretty capable text editor built into systemd.
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I thought it was called emacs.... or is that just a symlink to systemdedit?
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Alright, if you are not using folders, then how are you organizing your files?
Serious question; this is the first I've heard of a folder-less unix variant.
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Yes yes yes of course... lots of aspies on here.
I thought ", you insensitive clod!" was a good clue that I was just talking shit to be funny.
I'm using nvidia... (Score:1)
Hah! (Score:2)
I feel a bit bad now, because around week/two weeks ago I managed to find it out by myself that switching to UXA fixed the crashes on my machine. Looks like I should have made some fuss about it!
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It ain't a bad thing, if you find a fix or workaround and make a little fuss.
Re: (Score:1)
By shooting a black kid?
Or did you mean George Zimmer [wikipedia.org]?
(For comparison: George Zimmerman [wikipedia.org])
Why would a graphics driver bug... (Score:1)
... cause a crash when desktops are switched? All that does is move windows from onscreen to off and vice verca. What the hell is KDE doing with the X server than means this happens anyway?
Re: (Score:2)
Oddly enough ... desktops are rendered in graphics, and bugs cause strange behavior because nobody planned for them.
There's probably tons of things which can go wrong when your graphics driver has bugs in it.
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Oddly enough windows are moved around all the time. There must be something specific they're doing here wrt switching desktops since apparently the crash doesn't happen at other times.
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Where do you get the idea that the crash doesn't happen at other times? I looked around and see reports from a month ago of XBMC on GNOME crashing on startup, and mpv player crashing after watching a video for a bit, all originating from the same point in the same driver. There's a bug in Intel's new SNA driver and this causes various failures in otherwise-working code which happens to rely on the driver; switching to Intel's older UXA driver fixes the problem.
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You are the one saying this is just a move. Did you write the code? Do you know what it does?
Or are you just naively deciding the bug must be in moving windows because that's what you think it is?
There's a lot of pieces to a window manager and a graphic driver.
Obviously, some of these are interacting and causing the crash. Saying must be something specific ... well, that's the nature of bugs, you have to do the right things to trigger them.
If it was "just moving windows", the crash would happen all the t
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FYI I've written a window manager. Switching desktops involves nothing more than moving the correct windows on and off screen. You can't unmap them because that generates a different event which the applications might respond to incorrectly in the circumstances.
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... cause a crash when desktops are switched? All that does is move windows from onscreen to off and vice verca. What the hell is KDE doing with the X server than means this happens anyway?
Bugs like that are discovered when you actually starts using new features to render things more hardware accelerated. If no major application used it before, it is common to uncover bugs in drivers. The alternative though is not use new features.
taskbar (Score:2)
just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
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Because Plasma is in every respect a traditional DE but then with a new engine.
That admittedly requires some tuning.
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just installed Kububtu 15 with plasma. yikes, there's no task bar or "start"-like menu anymore. How do I get back those interface features I'm comfortable with?
You may need to add a few widgets to do this, I think you can right-click to bring up the appropriate menu. It was a bit of a nuisance but in about 10 minutes or so I was able to get a reasonably good start menu and taskbar. It was disappointing that it didn't import the profile and layout from v4, though.
I could probably look up exactly how it was done, but right now I've switched to XFCE for the time being, because Plasma 5 crashes if you look at it funny. This on an nVidia card with the proprietary dr
Intel graphics (Score:1)
Once a upon a time, Intel used to be the answer to users questions about which graphics hardware would work best on a new linux installation. It was never the fastest hardware, but it had the reputation for being the most stable with adequate performance for ordinary desktop use. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore with high performance desktop shells exposing more and more flaws with Intel's graphic stack.
Re: (Score:2)
I have never found Intel graphics hardware to be the most stable for Linux, far from it. For years I had a lot of problems with Intel graphics such as every time my laptop went into standby the graphics would never recover. At work I had two identical desktops and with the same image I could only get X11 to work on one of them and then it refused to support the monitor's resolution. The other identical machine would just lock up. I dropped in nVidia cards and suddenly everything worked well. It just worked
If you want something done right... (Score:1)
You have to do it yourself.
If I were a KDE dev, I would write a display server in house, bundle it with LibreOffice, then roll the whole thing into systemd. Then we could finally ditch those pesky operating systems all together.
Just think of how easy ps output would be to read.
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I agree. I've had nothing but trouble with Intel's graphics drivers compared to nVidia. Generally the nVidia proprietary drivers just work and work well.
Are you sure it's Intel? (Score:3)
Considering we had a Samsung firmware bug in TRIM that turned out to not to be an issue with Samsung drives, but with the TRIM code itself.
Re: (Score:2)
The Samsung firmware bug is still there, in the Samsung drives. In addition there was a bug in the RAID0/10 TRIM code which Samsung fixed.
So no, we did not have a Samsung firmware bug in TRIM that was not an issue with Samsung drives.
glamor? (Score:2)
How about using glamor instead of uxa? Does that work around it too, or is the bug just so rare I haven't noticed it?
I run KDE plasma 5, have been using glamor for a long while, and am running the xorg-edgers drivers... and I haven't seen anything like the bug described at kde.org.
I'm going to regret asking (Score:2)
I'm going to regret asking but.. is KDE talking directly to the graphics drivers? I knew the situation with X on a programming level was bad but.. that bad?
Is that why starting with version 4 KDE has worked terribly (if at all) in VNC? Is it because it wants to talk directly to the hardware's drivers and VNC is something other than hardware?
- Forgive me if the KDE/VNC situation has improved, I stopped using KDE in part because of this over a year ago.
Re: I'm going to regret asking (Score:2)
I dunno - I've used KDE4 vnc sessions on our "homes" server (Fedora) since about 2009. Maybe they cleared it up in 2008?
So what's the reason for all the other brokenness? (Score:1)
I've used KDE for a while, from 3 through 5. 4 worked really well and when I got the upgrade to 5, I thought that I finally had the perfect desktop - if it worked like 4 and looked like 5, I'd be ecstatic.
Unfortunately, I found it to be overall a little sluggish to start and that deteriorated over time to the often reported states of coming out of screensaver to a black screen with cursor for a minute before anything would show; a programs menu which would take 30 seconds to open the first time, no matter h