Enabling opengl 2.1 on intel gen3 breaks the Unity desktop (and possibly others)
Submitted by ser..@..il.com
Assigned to Ian Romanick
Description
Just tried the latest mesa from git with commit 97217a40 on an Asus Eeepc 1000H with Intel gen3 graphics. Indeed I now see opengl 2.1 and shading language 1.2 advertised. Yet, this unfortunately completely breaks the Ubuntu's Unity desktop.
I believe that the issue is that the window manager thinks that it can rely on the hardware for some operations (effects). However, these are so painfully slow that the machine appears to hang. For instance, the log out operation is meant to show a log-out panel. When the graphics hardware supports it, the panel fades in. However, this operation now takes about 1.5 minutes and the machine seems to hang. Trying to show the "search your computer" panel is so slow that I had to reboot the machine.
How about reverting this option until desktop managers learn that they should not play effects on gen3 even if it advertises some capabilities? Or at least how about making the opengl level configurable via xorg.conf? Just like Unity, some other desktop managers may he bitten by this issue, as well as other pieces of software.
Version: git