After an evaluation, GNOME has moved from Bugzilla to GitLab. Learn more about GitLab.
No new issues can be reported in GNOME Bugzilla anymore.
To report an issue in a GNOME project, go to GNOME GitLab.
Do not go to GNOME Gitlab for: Bluefish, Doxygen, GnuCash, GStreamer, java-gnome, LDTP, NetworkManager, Tomboy.
Bug 647158 - Garbled text and other quirks on ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (R200)
Garbled text and other quirks on ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (R200)
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: gnome-shell
Classification: Core
Component: drivers
3.0.x
Other Linux
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: gnome-shell-maint
gnome-shell-maint
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2011-04-08 12:07 UTC by Oveek
Modified: 2012-08-23 17:51 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Garbled text in the shell (334.24 KB, image/png)
2011-04-08 12:07 UTC, Oveek
Details
Messed up rendering in the calendar. (355.14 KB, image/png)
2011-04-08 12:09 UTC, Oveek
Details
Font rendering fail on ATI X1250 (713.42 KB, image/png)
2011-04-09 15:53 UTC, Christopher Albert
Details

Description Oveek 2011-04-08 12:07:15 UTC
Created attachment 185516 [details]
Garbled text in the shell

I'm testing Gnome 3.0 using the Gnome 3 livecd based on Fedora.

Shell functionality seems to work fine, but am experiencing a few cosmetic graphical quirks:

* Text in the gnome-shell interface (including task bar at the top of the screen, calendar, drop down user menu) is garbled and virtually unreadable. Text in programs and on window decorations (program title bars) is fine.
* Sometimes white squares display instead of application icons in the vertical bar on the left hand side of the activities display.
* Calendar doesn't render properly.

Attached screen shots that show the problems.

Testing on a Dell Latitude D600 laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 (R200 core) graphics card.

The overall functionality seems mostly unaffected. Can work with multiple apps in a workspace and drag apps between workspaces. There's increasing instability and artifacting that crops up when working with too many windows (around 4 to 5) on multiple workspaces, ultimately leading to a crash with a message saying it's necessary to log out.

Please let me know if there's any other info or logs I can provide.

Tried the same livecd on a newer Sony Vaio laptop with no problems.
Comment 1 Oveek 2011-04-08 12:09:26 UTC
Created attachment 185517 [details]
Messed up rendering in the calendar.
Comment 2 Owen Taylor 2011-04-08 12:42:52 UTC
Basically, this is not expected to work well - the r200 series is just too old. Unfortunately, we don't' currently have a mechanism for blacklisting hardware that technically meets the specs for GNOME 3 but isn't sufficiently capable or is expected to be buggy - for now you'll have to manually fallback mode in System Settings/System Info/Graphics.
Comment 3 Oveek 2011-04-08 15:07:49 UTC
Thanks for the quick response.

In my searching I found a few similar sentiments about Gnome 3 on the r200 series, but I'm hoping it's possible to shed a bit more light on why gnome-shell isn't expected to work well on it. I think the r200 is more than adequate to handle the sorts of compositing effects seen in Gnome 3.

I say this because the effects in Compiz, and the compositing in KWin under KDE4 work perfectly on this card, and have run stably for quite sometime using the open source radeon drivers. I just cite these as evidence that the r200 driver has no problems with compositing window managers.

The glitches I'm seeing in gnome-shell seem quite minor. The garbled text is really the main thing. In the first screenshot you can see the workspace display and the thumbnailed apps all show up just fine. So I feel like pretty much everything but the text is working normally.

Are the anticipated problems due to Gallium not being supported in the r200? On the surface it seems the r200 should easily run gnome-shell, as it has no problems with virtually identical effects on other compositing window managers.
Comment 4 Christopher Albert 2011-04-09 15:53:26 UTC
Created attachment 185589 [details]
Font rendering fail on ATI X1250
Comment 5 Christopher Albert 2011-04-09 15:53:56 UTC
Actually also newer cards are affected. I have a similar problem with an onboard ATI Radeon X1250 (an Onboard X700, RV410) - see screenshot above.

My system configuration:

ArchLinux testing
Gnome Shell 3.0.0.2
Clutter 1.6.14
Clutter-GTK 1.0.0
X.Org X Server 1.10.0.901 (1.10.1 RC 1)

OpenGL strings are:

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS600
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.10.1
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:

I would like to find out where the problem lies - do you have an idea in which part of the code I should start looking?
Comment 6 Rui Matos 2011-04-09 18:00:27 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> Actually also newer cards are affected. I have a similar problem with an
> onboard ATI Radeon X1250 (an Onboard X700, RV410) - see screenshot above.

There is a report upstream with about the same hardware:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35998
Comment 7 Adam Pribyl 2011-04-09 18:43:01 UTC
Reffered bug is about gallium driver. Even thou the corruption is somewhat similar, this may and may not have the same cause. 

More details in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679579
Comment 8 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2011-04-10 14:05:25 UTC
I, too, wonder how this hardware would be inadequate to run gnome-shell compared to, say, an intel i915. It's a bit hard to think that a dedicated Radeon 9200 or similar wouldn't outperform an integrated chipset such as the i915 in every aspect.

Could you detail what's preventing it to be a contender and how gnome-shell/mutter is so much more demanding than compiz?
Comment 9 Owen Taylor 2011-04-10 15:29:33 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> I, too, wonder how this hardware would be inadequate to run gnome-shell
> compared to, say, an intel i915. It's a bit hard to think that a dedicated
> Radeon 9200 or similar wouldn't outperform an integrated chipset such as the
> i915 in every aspect.
> 
> Could you detail what's preventing it to be a contender and how
> gnome-shell/mutter is so much more demanding than compiz?

In some sense, yes, an R200 should be able to do an OK job running gnome-shell if you don't stress it too much. On the other hands:

- R200 has very limited and non-standard shader hardware, preventing various effects we use on from working correctly. These are optional, but we'd expect to only use more shaders in the future.

- With many newer generations of hardware (r300 r500, r600, r700, evergreen, northern islands, and fusion) out, there's a lot of effort and hardware testing that is involved to keep things running on more current card.

- R200 parts are pretty much exclusively AGP. Developers generally don't have access to R200 hardware without maintaining entirely separate test systems. (And AGP in general was a marginal technology that required a lot of workarounds, and without it being used on current systems, this stuff just rots.)

So, while nobody is going to reject patches to the R200 drivers that fix bugs, it's just not a good use of the Radeon driver developers time to ask them to spend time on it.
Comment 10 Hans de Goede 2011-04-10 22:45:03 UTC
Hi All,

This is a mesa issue which is being tracked in:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34280

I've attached a patch (against mesa) there which fixes this. I'm also doing
a mesa scratch build for F-15 for those of you using that, see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678803

Regards,

Hans
Comment 12 Hans de Goede 2011-04-11 07:45:07 UTC
(In reply to comment #11)
> Hans: So should https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35998 be a dup of
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34280 ?

No, 35998 is with gallium on an rs600, from the attached glxinfo:
"Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS600"

Where as 34280 (and this bug) is about classic mesa on any r2xx card.
Comment 13 Adam Pribyl 2011-04-11 10:11:23 UTC
The text corruption is fixed by Hans's patch. Also shadows are correct now. Some artifacts still remain: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679579
Comment 14 Rui Matos 2011-04-11 13:19:28 UTC
(In reply to comment #12)
> (In reply to comment #11)
> > Hans: So should https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35998 be a dup of
> > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34280 ?
> 
> No, 35998 is with gallium on an rs600, from the attached glxinfo:
> "Gallium 0.4 on ATI RS600"
> 
> Where as 34280 (and this bug) is about classic mesa on any r2xx card.

Sorry for that, I added that reference in reply to comment #5 but that was a mistake as that's really different hardware and driver.
Comment 15 Oveek 2011-04-12 14:07:34 UTC
(In reply to comment #13)
> The text corruption is fixed by Hans's patch. Also shadows are correct now.
> Some artifacts still remain: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=679579

Thanks to Hans for posting about that patch here. Cleaned up all the screwed up text in the first screenshot I attached.

My main system is actually ArchLinux (I originally tested using the Fedora Live CD). Compiled mesa from git using the patch and the text rendering issues in the top bar and menus are fixed.

There are still a couple of places where the text is funky like the ALT-F2 program launcher, and numbers in the calendar.

The other big problem now is I can't open the application section of the activities view. I logged some OpenGL errors from gnome-shell/clutter. Will see if there's already an open bug.
Comment 16 Oveek 2011-04-12 15:29:57 UTC
Booted up the Fedora LiveCD again and installed the rpm from the F-15 scratch build Hans did. Text is fixed almost everywhere and the applications section works fine on the LiveCD so it looks like there are some issues unique to my Arch install.
Comment 17 Florian Müllner 2012-08-23 17:51:40 UTC
The mesa bug has been fixed, closing.