Various issues with Intel Drivers for KWin in Kubuntu 12.10

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 06:40:20 PM Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 October 2012 12:24:38 Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> right, but still it is:
> a) unlikely that those got tested by a large user base
> b) possible that the regression got introduced lately

I did talk with the Ubuntu X people and we're going to try some of the 
intermediate packages and see where the regression got introduced.  If we can 
narrow it down, then we'll see about a post-release fix.

I'm not arguing your point, I agree.  I was just trying to clarify.

If someone has an affected system, please join us on #kubuntu-devel and help us 
get this sorted.

Scott K