Feedback from xf86-video-intel exa branch

[Daniel Kasak]

I've been testing out the exa branch of the xf86-video-intel driver (
against xorg-server-1.1.1 ).

Firstly, a bug report ...

If I *don't* enable exa, I get visual corruption in many windows ( but
not all ) when I scroll, move things over them, etc. Examples of apps
that demonstrate this behaviour are firefox, thunderbird, vmware. An app
that *doesn't* seem to be affected is Eterm. If I enable the composite
extension and start xcompmgr, this problem is fixed! Also of note, is
that enabling the composite extension doesn't seem to be *that* bad on
performance ... with exa disabled. The corruption occurs whether the
composite extension is enabled or not.

Next ... exa. If I enable exa and the composite extension, performance
is horrible. It feels like the out-of-memory problems I used to have on
a radeon with exa if I opened too many windows. To be fair, this is an
i845G with something like 12MB of memory ( shared too ), so I suppose
this is to be expected :( Anyway, compositing works amazingly well
*without* exa. The above visual corruptions are fixed with exa enabled (
with *or* without the composite extension being enabled ).

-- 
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989
email: dkasak at nusconsulting.com.au
website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au