Attention Turns To Open-Source Drivers & Firefox

[droidhacker]

A little fact that a bunch of people in this thread seem to be missing.....
You don't need a firefox update to take advantage of fixed GL drivers!

MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=true firefox

[DeepDayze]

It seems to me that easily end-user runnable test frameworks that make it easy to reproduce bugs as well as capture debugging information on what's going on at the time of the bug - not just for WebGL but for all APIs - would go a LONG ways towards improving the state of open source video drivers.

I have been absolutely plagued by stability and video corruption issues on a number of different video cars - admittedly mostly ATI / radeon.

If I had a an easy way to reproduce these issues and report USEFUL information about these issues back to the developers, this would improve the user experience not only for me, but for everyone else using similar hardware.

Issues I've had:

1. Lack of developer interest - not sure if this is because of poorly written bug reports (I tend to report my bugs upstream first w/Fedora) or lack of developer resources.
2. Developers instructing me to compile stuff from source as it might be fixed in the latest before seriously looking at the report - unfortunately this is difficult to do and instructions on how to do so are sparse.

Good idea!

There should be some standardized easy to use tools for automating these tests and capture debug information (eg, backtraces and memory dumps) in a format suitable for a bug report in the event of a failure of a test. That should help in providing good quality bug reports for the developers to find the problem and come up with a fix.

as for (2), another set of easy to use scripts can be devised to automate the process of getting the latest sources from git from appropriate developer repos and building the new binary packages appropriate for your distro. Such scripts can be called from the test suite scripts as well when checking for solutions for failures.

Automating bug reporting and solution checking will be a big help for end users and developers alike, so problems can be found and fixed and fixes pushed out to users.

I believe Microsoft does something like this with Windows via the Error Reporting services by prompting the user to send the crash report to MS and also check if there is a fix available. If a fix or workaround for that particular crash is available it's obtained and installed automatically. Linux can benefit from something like this as well.

[DoDoENT]

as for (2), another set of easy to use scripts can be devised to automate the process of getting the latest sources from git from appropriate developer repos and building the new binary packages appropriate for your distro.

Sounds like AUR...

[DeepDayze]

Sounds like AUR...

Right, if you are using Arch. Most likely the most up to date stuff is in a developers' git/cvs repo not in a distro's repo though.

Debian and fedora have their own build systems though so there should be a good way to get the fixed code in a distro-independent way and then leverage the distro's build system to make a package that can be installed.

[Yfrwlf]

for most users it's then a matter of waiting for the distribution vendors to pick-up the new packages.

Aah the shackles of open source stacks not coming with universal package management and systems for the intelligent selection/replacement/removal of certain systems so open source users will be free to easily install or try out whatever they want.

I'd like to see Xorg develop a system which allowed users to install various Xorg binary versions and drivers side-by-side on their system in a cross-distro way, with an easy way to select between versions they want to run/try.

They complain about needing test data, but ordinary Linux users can't provide them that if they don't offer an easy way for them to install and run it.

[allquixotic]

I wonder if they're also looking into problems with Kwin. Problems with Kwin - Kwin fault or bad cooperation; problems with Firefox - 'our' Xorg/Mesa devs fault.

It's because the developers of Xorg/mesa use and care about Firefox. They don't necessarily use or care about Kwin.