GMA 500: Screen problem - regression!

**lucazade** · September 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by NormanFLinux

so it shouldn't be a problem with the Gallium llvmpipe which is supposed to allow default Unity/Cinnamon desktop environments to be run on computers without accelerated graphics video cards.

Gallium llvmpipe allows to execute Opengl stuff on the CPU instead of the GPU.
This means that the Atom is doing a giant work.. and it is simply not able to handle it.

The Gallium llvmpipe driver is a software rasterizer that uses LLVM to do runtime code generation. Shaders, point/line/triangle rasterization and vertex processing are implemented with LLVM IR which is translated to x86 or x86-64 machine code. Also, the driver is multithreaded to take advantage of multiple CPU cores (up to 8 at this time). It's the fastest software rasterizer for Mesa.

http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

llvmpipe needs at least a multicore 64bit cpu to work well and a lot of profiling... it is not good for ARM or Atom. take a look at phoronix benchmarks.

**fjgaude** · September 15th, 2012

Thanks, Luca, for the education. I suppose that GMA500 boxes will not be of much use when 12.10 is released. We'll find that 12.04 will be good for five years. When that period is over my Dell mini-10 will be retired to the wood pile. So be it.

**NormanFLinux** · September 15th, 2012

Originally Posted by lucazade

Gallium llvmpipe allows to execute Opengl stuff on the CPU instead of the GPU.
This means that the Atom is doing a giant work.. and it is simply not able to handle it.

http://www.mesa3d.org/llvmpipe.html

llvmpipe needs at least a multicore 64bit cpu to work well and a lot of profiling... it is not good for ARM or Atom. take a look at phoronix benchmarks.

I did a clean install of Ubuntu 12.10 and it runs acceptably except for occasional crashes. The point is llvmpipe WAS provided to run single core computers at a standard of efficiency minus all the fancy graphics. I can live without the fancy rendering. All I care is the computer works. The lower half of the Unity launcher is mushed up.

Its a beta after all and if Canonical wants to make Unity run on ALL computers - management problems need to be resolved. I run SUSE 12.2 Cinnamon on a dog of VIA C-7 chip network and everything works fine!

My Dell Mini 10 boots up to a black screen rather than the splash screen but then the desktop loads to the correct screen size. As mentioned its a beta and far more work has to be done to make Unity run acceptably on low-end computers.

**KEYofR** · October 10th, 2012

I haven't had any video problems on my gma500 Sony Vaio P since the saga above. But this is with lxde and e17 and xfce. No kde, gnome, and certainly no unity.

On 3.6.0 mainline nightly currently it's even faster than it's ever been before except for the few times I was able to use a proprietary driver.
Not fast exactly, but I can watch a YouTube video in a 2 or 3 inch window and it's almost smooth and the audio mostly stays in sync.
All the normal window/app/desktop activity is fine.

On the other hand my ath9k wifi has been complete crap on the entire range of 3.5.0 and 3.6.0. Worked fine on 3.2.0. Don't remember if I ever tried anything between 3.2.0 and 3.5.0. That's why I'm posting this from my phone!

Can't win.