The State Of X Video Drivers, OpenGL, And Framebuffers

[clevariant]

<rant>

For countless hours have I toiled, working simply to optimize my X on a Dell 5100 with a Radeon 7500 card. Untold forum discussions (some of them impossibly long), howtos and man pages have not brought me to that plateau of satisfaction. I say this, only in part because OpenGL applications like Unreal Tournament run consistently faster in WindowsXP than in Gentoo (even with direct rendering working). At least two posters in these forums claim to be getting speeds over 1000FPS in glxgears on identical hardware, whereas I cannot break 730FPS. So I know my card can do better than it has so far.

Then there's framebuffer support, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't work with OpenGL at all on the Radeon 7500. But I'm not sure, because no one else seems to be sure, either. I know framebuffer support is still young, and I'm using a 2.4.22 kernel, not the dev' one. But the real problem is, framebuffer support already provides some valueable features: it makes X start up almost immediately, for example, whereas it takes at least several seconds without (not to mention such eye candy as mouse cursor shadows, which I can't get without the framebuffer).

So I'd like to use the framebuffer, but accessing Enlightenment's menus makes the screen go black; libxosd is all messy, so I can't use my OSD clock; and most of all, no one seems to have gotten OpenGL to work with it.

Now, the framebuffer aside, it took me far too long just to get X optimized, and I'm still not happy with it. Knowing that linux is a faster OS than Windoze, I expect games to run better on it, but they don't. I know there are problems with writing drivers for many devices (not to mention just finding drivers), but I could live with that, if I could just feel like I've done all I could with X. But the state of X and friends remains chaotic. None of the documentation really spells out everything, and too many people are running around like heads with their chickens cut off (you've probably seen that "ATI radeon Sticky" post with 1067 replies currently!).

And if you want to do anything really unorthodox, like, oh, use your s-video output, or run dual heads, well, then chances are your problems are multiplied. Sure, it can be done, but it ain't easy. This is my point. In the present state, only the most advanced users can hope to achieve a fully functional, fully optimized video configuration: that which their hardware is actually capable of.

</rant>

Until these systems really mature (particularly the framebuffer subsystem), I think what's needed is some more or less specialized and comprehensive documentation. General howtos are not cutting it, because there are just too many variations. The ideal configuration for a Radeon M7 is different from that of a Geforce card, and more and more things are being built into each new kernel, and using the framebuffer is quite different from running X normally. With gentoo, there is a specific order in which things must be emerged, once the kernel is properly compiled, so documents written by Red Hat or Slackware users are of little use to us.

Therefore, I call for a very specific set of documents--to which I will contribute as I might--for configuring the X Windows system, one for each combination of kernel and popular video card. These could contain a section for adding framebuffer support, or we could further divide them according to kernel, video card and the framebuffer. For myself, I want to know exactly how to get a framebuffer GUI on kernel 2.4.22 with a Radeon 7500, including OpenGL if that's even possible. (After so many hours of working on it, I could only lay out the basic "getting started" procedure.) This should probably be done Wiki-style, so that those advanced users could refine it little by little, without adding 1067 separate posts. Documents can be added by copying and modifying that of a similar system; and ideally, users will be able to find the one that matches their gear, follow it step by step, and in a couple of hours they will know their GUI is as tricked out as possible. That's what is lacking: not just a functional desktop but a fully functional one.

In summary, X configuration and optimization is still a big mess, and until that changes, very specific howtos are the only good answer. It may seem like a lot of work, but it makes sense as a community effort, because ultimately it would save average users like me a hell of a lot of time. Whether linux will begin to take over the desktop market is a big question today (if you're reading any of the tech' news feeds), and this configuration problem is the sort of thing that will hold it back. Surely a default installation can get X up and running painlessly enough, in most cases, using the vesa driver--but more demanding users (whose opinions hold more weight) will expect it to do as well as Windows. When they find it doesn't, they will spend a few hours trying to optimize it, and they will discover what we linux fans already know: in fact it's a royal pain in the ass. I live for the day when I can actually recommend linux to my friends and relatives, but for now, I often wonder if it's worth my own while.
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