[Mageia-dev] Fwd: fallback mode

[Olav Vitters]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 01:05:04AM +0100, JA Magallón wrote:
> I have connected my Atom netbook to a big monitor, and it handles
> perfecly the FullHD resolution. Gnome full mode works fine and fast.
> Its an Atom N450, graphics are recognised as N10 or Intel(R) Pineview GM.
> 
> All this with the monitor as the _ONLY_ monitor active.
> 
> If I try to use it on a multi-monitor setup, X gives a message about non-tiled
> framebuffer and gnome-shell is slooooow as hell, unusable.
> Probably that is a hardware limit, or a bug, because it happens even if
> the external monitor is a projector at 1024x768.
> 
> I was wating to do more tests to submit a bug....

This might be a known driver/xorg issue. Various hardware either don't
work, or gets slow if the framebuffer exceeds 2048 pixels
(width/height/something). I'm not sure what the plan with that was, if
that could be fixed still in xorg, or only in Wayland. I think it was
fixable in xorg, but I'll have to check.

In any case, the obvious status is that at the moment some people cannot
run GNOME 3 and they have to rely on fallback mode. Debian suggested a
method to detect this during installation time. I don't expect GNOME 3
to suddenly be good enough for everyone in 3.8. This as many of the
causes are not due to GNOME (bad drivers).

-- 
Regards,
Olav