Fedora Project has been on the forefont of development and adoption of kernel mode setting to enhance the desktop linux experience by making fairly invasive infrastructure improvements that affect the interaction between Xorg and the Linux kernel. In the past, one of the common way to test Xorg performance has been to use glxgears. While that hasn't been a particular good way to do it ever, the switch to kernel mode setting for Intel drivers ahead of the Fedora 11 Beta release to be available shortly has exposed the fallacy of this. In short, don't use glxgears. There are better methods to assess performance.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Without HAL, Xorg used to poke the hardware directly bypassing the kernel which would occasionally result in weird and hard to track bugs. Using the same infrastructure as rest of the desktop is a very good thing. We can finally get some integration.
The reason that Xorg did it's own thing and duplicate parts of the operating system was because it was build on proprietary Unix systems with no deep access to OS internals. We cannot continue to carry on historical baggage and mistakes.
Member since:2005-07-06
No, the reason is that Linus didn't want video drivers in his kernel. "Just do what mama said: Use VGA text mode and X" is a popular quote from him. Also remember the big kernel flame war about GGI/KGI.
It's ironic that more than a decade later, people realiser the GGI/KGI folks have been right: Video-configuration should be in-kernel.
I still haven't had the answer why swapping buffers needs to be slower because of kernel-mode-setting, though.
Member since:
2006-11-18
Glxgears never should been used as a benchmark, it only shows that 3D is up and running.
Other thing is that my buddy noticed a slow down after all that new things went up (DRI2/KMS/...) in the 3D stack, not only glxgears.
I do not bother more about all this "3D developpment" generally, xorg becomes bigger and bigger shit, things that used to work now does not work, it appears that hald is needed when it never was, sad really ...