Bug 701185

Summary: Clutter rendering does only work with CLUTTER_VBLANK=none
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Christian Krause <chkr>
Component: clutterAssignee: Peter Robinson <pbrobinson>
Status: CLOSED NEXTRELEASE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: unspecified Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 14CC: itamar, mads, mcepl, metherid, pbrobinson, walters, xgl-maint
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2011-10-11 10:52:50 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Christian Krause 2011-05-01 22:19:01 UTC
Description of problem:
Clutter-based programs (like gthumb, gpx-viewer, some banshee extensions etc.) don't work in F14 (at least with the with the following kind of ATI hardware and driver combination - the issue does _not_ happen with nvidia cards and their proprietary drivers). The part of the screen/window drawn by clutter is never updated.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
clutter-gtk.i686                          0.10.8-2.fc14        @updates         
mesa-dri-drivers.i686                     7.9-5.fc14           @updates         
mesa-libGL.i686                           7.9-5.fc14           @updates         
mesa-libGL-devel.i686                     7.9-5.fc14           @updates         
mesa-libGLU.i686                          7.9-5.fc14           @updates         
mesa-libGLU-devel.i686                    7.9-5.fc14           @updates       
  
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Mobility Radeon HD 3400 Series

xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.13.1-0.4.20100705git37b348059.fc14.i686


How reproducible:
100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1. start gthumb
2. Edit -> Preferences -> Slideshow -> Transition effect -> Push from right (basically any effect besides "None" will cause the issue)
3. start a slide show
  
Actual results:
just a black window

Expected results:
slide show of photos


Additional info:
The effect is the same for the other clutter-based programs. E.g. gpx-viewer doesn't update the map panel at all.

Workaround: 
Start all clutter-based programs with "CLUTTER_VBLANK=none".

I found the hint for the environment variable on
http://kdekorte.blogspot.com/2011/03/fedora-14s-clutter-with-r600g-from-git.html where it is also stated, that the issue is caused by some disagreement between the ATI ddx driver and clutter 1.2 regarding the vblank signaling.

Comment 1 Peter Robinson 2011-05-01 23:07:27 UTC
Have you tried it with Fedora 15 beta?

Comment 2 Christian Krause 2011-05-04 08:44:35 UTC
Sorry for the late response. It was quite tricky to find a program to test this in F15: most of them are not yet ported to GTK3 and so they are still linked against GTK2. That means that they can't be compiled against F15's clutter-gtk (which is linked against GTK3).

Finally I have found "gnibbles" from gnome-games-extra:

"gnibbles" shows the reported issue in F14 (it only works with CLUTTER_VBLANK=none), but it works (at least somehow, it was quite slow) in F15.

Comment 3 Peter Robinson 2011-05-04 14:20:04 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> Sorry for the late response. It was quite tricky to find a program to test this
> in F15: most of them are not yet ported to GTK3 and so they are still linked
> against GTK2. That means that they can't be compiled against F15's clutter-gtk
> (which is linked against GTK3).

There's a package called clutter-gtk010 for apps that haven't been moved to gtk3 as yet.

Comment 4 Christian Krause 2011-05-04 19:34:52 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> There's a package called clutter-gtk010 for apps that haven't been moved to
> gtk3 as yet.

Thanks for the tip! I have now re-tested the problem with gthumb (compiled against clutter-gtk010):

F15: works
F14: does not work, window content is not updated unless CLUTTER_VBLANK is used

Comment 5 Matěj Cepl 2011-05-04 22:02:16 UTC
This doesn't look to me at all as a xorg bug. Reassigning to clutter for further investigation.

Comment 6 Peter Robinson 2011-05-07 15:24:22 UTC
(In reply to comment #5)
> This doesn't look to me at all as a xorg bug. Reassigning to clutter for
> further investigation.

It doesn't happen on any other card, clutter doesn't have card specific issues so it must be card/driver related. It might be kernel DRM driver related. Does this kernel fix the issue:

* Tue May 03 2011 Dave Airlie <airlied> 2.6.38.5-23
- radeon updates from 2.6.39 with cayman + fixes for lots of things including Fusion.
- vblank fix for core drm

Comment 7 Christian Krause 2011-06-04 22:50:20 UTC
*** Bug 710795 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8 Christian Krause 2011-06-04 23:01:32 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> It doesn't happen on any other card, clutter doesn't have card specific issues
> so it must be card/driver related. It might be kernel DRM driver related. Does
> this kernel fix the issue:
> 
> * Tue May 03 2011 Dave Airlie <airlied> 2.6.38.5-23
> - radeon updates from 2.6.39 with cayman + fixes for lots of things including
> Fusion.
> - vblank fix for core drm

As far as I can remember I had tried this kernel, but it was for F15 and it somehow didn't work in F14 correctly. Sorry, it looks like I forgot to mention it in this bug report.

However, since I have updated my only system where I could reproduce the problem to F15, I can't reproduce the issue anymore. However, it looks like that the issue is still there in F14 (see recent duplicate).