Various issues with Intel Drivers for KWin in Kubuntu 12.10

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 05:59:23 PM Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> Hi Kubuntu-Developers,
> 
> please note: I'm not subscribed, please CC me in replies
> 
> I just wanted to inform you (in case you are not yet aware of it) that we in
> KWin started to receive a bunch of bug reports for Kubuntu 12.10 in the
> combination with the Intel drivers since this weekend.
> 
> The issues are:
> * crashes (e.g. Bug #308369)
> * performance problems (e.g. Bug #308385)
> * rendering issues (e.g. Bug #308439)
> 
> So far we do not have enough data to say whether there is a real and general
> issue, but I'm concerned enough to send this mail.
> 
> What we know is that the issues are related to Mesa 9.0 which got released
> just last week. Several users told us that downgrading to Mesa 8 the
> problems go away (of course not an option for Kubuntu users).
> 
> My recommendation would be to put a word of warning into the release note. I
> find the situation very difficult as I neither want you to warn about a
> problem that does not exist, on the other hand I don't want users to run
> into the issue and then blaming KDE for bad performance.
> 
> Also for the next cycle I would recommend to try to increase the timespan
> between Mesa driver releases and the release of Ubuntu. I don't think it's a
> good idea to ship a new Mesa version before the rolling release
> distributions have played guinea pig ;-)

I'm all for not breaking things.  One point of clarification though ...

Quantal has had git snapshots of mesa 9 since August, so it's not like they 
suddenly jumped all the way from 8 to 9 at the last second.

Scott K