Finally, Beryl on FreeBSD
Published November 1st, 2006 in Beryl, FreeBSD, GIT, X.orgAfter 3 days of fight with xorg-server, mesa, dri and beryl, I’ve finally managed to make it work on my Dell Latitude D620 (with Intel i945GM). Here is the screenshot. Agreed, there’s not much to see, and the screenshot isn’t the nicest one you have seen. The laptop is running -CURRENT with all the debugging features (WITNESS and stuff) so I’m hoping it has a substantial impact on performance because beryl isn’t so smooth. But hey, that’s only a cheap intel chipset, so I can’t really complain.
I haven’t had so much luck with nvidia driver (beta driver, the one in ports don’t have GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap), beryl crashes somewhere in libGLcore.so.1. That said, I noticed yesterday that xorg-server was built against Mesa 6.5 (instead of 6.5.1). I think it doesn’t matter since I use LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1 (being nvidia libGL) but I’ll rebuild xorg-server against Mesa 6.5.1, just to be sure.
Most of the ports are written, but they’re still not in the git repository because of missing bits (imake/makedepend from freedesktop) and lack of polishing but I hope to commit them by the end of the week, so you reader (if any) can test them.
People have been complaining about problems to clone/fetch/pull the repo from time to time (or everytime for the least lucky). We’ll probably set up a git mirror soon. Anyway, with 6.2-RELEASE, the bge(4) bugs preventing me to use git-daemon should be gone.
Actually, iirc, the dominant performance issue with beryl/compiz on current xorg servers is an over-reporting of damage during window moves. We haven’t worked out what the really correct fix is for it yet, but there’s a hack floating around to avoid that. It should help significantly with wobbly-windows and such.
I think we also have the possibility to greatly improve our current EXT_tfp hack implementation using damage. I think ajax had some work done on that at one point.
Yay! That looks awesome! I can’t wait to try it
Keep up the great work!
-m
do you know where i can find some how-to instructions on this?
Everything is in the wiki. See http://wikitest.freebsd.org/ModularXorg/. Note that this is highly experimental, I wouldn’t recommend switching from 6.9 to modular now.
It’s in a pretty bad shape at the moment, libxcb depending on pthread is causing a few problems. I’ll fix this next week.