Ubuntu 17.10 Still Working Towards Video Acceleration, Unity 7 Woes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 17.10 Still Working Towards Video Acceleration, Unity 7 Woes

Will Cooke of Canonical has shared another weekly status update for the work going into the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 and their other efforts this cycle...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-AA-Unity-7-Non-Def-Woes

[Veerappan]

Presumably that will come down to enabling the VDPAU state tracker by default for Gallium3D drivers.

Cooke has also warned that while Unity 7 will remain in the archive for installation on Ubuntu 17.10, the experience will be degraded. Among the expected issues at this time are input problems with GNOME using libinput but Unity 7 not dealing well with it, default GNOME applications may look less integrated, no online accounts support, settings problems, and less Unity launcher integration.

Just to clarify that those issues are only if you're running unity 7 in 17.10. many of these issues are due to the removal of all of the Ubuntu patches to GTK and the various Gnome applications.

Also, given that the source blog says that they're working on Intel+VAAPI, I don't see why they wouldn't enable VAAPI for the radeonsi/nouveau drivers as well as part of the process. Vdpau is not compatible with Wayland from what I've read, and VAAPI is, so it'd be a shame to waste time getting vdpau working when gallium already supports VAAPI.

[cl333r]

I think nouveau doesn't support hw-accelerated vdpau, if so, Canonical can't fix this.

[Gusar]

I think nouveau doesn't support hw-accelerated vdpau

It does, up to VP5 (Geforce 600/700). VAAPI too. See here for more info: https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/

@Veerappan: It seems to me the VAAPI issues are more about Gstreamer (or specifically about Totem) than they are about drivers themselves. Well, unless Canonical is still messing about with the Intel Media SDK, rather than using libva-intel-driver. Then there'd be problems, because the SDK's proprietary libva fork is not fully compatible with the open source libva.

There is one problem with the gallium vaapi drivers though, there's no EGL interop yet, which is what both Kodi and mpv use. And that's because AMD hardware works differently from Intel hardware, so changes to libva will be required and the devs haven't fully worked out everything yet.

[andyprough]

They have reportedly hit "a lot of bugs along the way" from the VA-API driver to issues in media players and GStreamer.

Shocking.

Tumbleweed running very nicely over here right now. Kind of glad I decided to try it out while Canonical goes through this latest reboot.

[Veerappan]

There is one problem with the gallium vaapi drivers though, there's no EGL interop yet, which is what both Kodi and mpv use. And that's because AMD hardware works differently from Intel hardware, so changes to libva will be required and the devs haven't fully worked out everything yet.

Didn't Arch have an egl+vaapi patch that someone was looking into upstreaming, or was that the intel-only piece?

[Gusar]

Didn't Arch have an egl+vaapi patch that someone was looking into upstreaming, or was that the intel-only piece?

I'm not aware of anything Arch-specifig in this area. Intel has had vaapi-egl interop in upstream for some time now, it's used successfully by Kodi and mpv.