[SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

speps · 2010-11-27 14:30:14

With the latest mesa 7.9, kernel 2.6.36.1 and xorg 1.9.2 repo updates i cannot get anymore opengl apps to work.
X starts only with KMS (without segfaults), but when i try (ex.) glxgears i get:

Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.

and no FPS output.

I've tried stracing and ltracing and i get both stuck on

strace ==> read(3, "\26\0!\0\2\0\200\1\2\0\200\1\206\0\340\0\0\0\0\0,\1,\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 4096) = 32
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}], 1, -1
(fd 3 is a socket)

ltrace ==> glClear(16640, 0x7fffc634b8f0, 0x85f798, -1, 1

I'm on a RV530 (mobility radeon x1600)

$ glxinfo | grep -i opengl
OpenGL vendor string: X.Org R300 Project
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on RV530
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.9
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:

No WW && no EE in Xorg.0.log or errors in dmesg, with or without xorg.conf

Last edited by speps (2011-08-06 00:02:29)

AndyRTR · 2010-11-28 09:18:16

check for possible upstream fixes: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/log/?h=7.9

ConnorBehan · 2010-12-06 03:49:53

Exact same thing happened to me and I think the problem is gallium. Reverting to mesa 7.8 and libdrm 2.4.21 fixes it.

speps · 2011-02-01 00:32:28

@ConnorBehan
Nice to know i'm not the only one. Which card and arch?

Btw, with version 7.10, still no solutions. While this is not fixed, i'm using a
personal non-gallium package. I'm filling a bug report on freedesktop.

ConnorBehan · 2011-02-03 03:16:18

I'm using an ATI Radeon X1550 card and the chipset is RV515 on an i686 arch. I don't expect gallium to work with it for a long time. And that's the least of my worries. The only kernel where my card gives somewhat decent framerates is 2.6.31. At some point I am going to bisect where the problematic commit is by compiling kernels between .31 and .32 hundreds of times. I just don't think I'll be able to until the summer.

speps · 2011-02-03 08:21:31

@ConnorBehan
Thank for your reply. I'm on a Mobility Radeon x1600 (RV530) @ x86_64.
Bored to build my own non gallium package every time, so this time
I decided to tackle the issue.

I discovered that running glxgears (or any opengl app) with one of

vblank_mode=0 glxgears
vblank_mode=1 glxgears

solves the black hole issue.
Seems like if there is no .drirc or env variable, vblank_mode unset
is the default and it causes the empty output.

So to solve the black output create a ~/.drirc with

you can use both "0" or "1" as you need.

Nevertheless, the gallium performances are still worst.
I get about ~350 FPS with glxgears and a lot of apps or games
that run smooth with old drivers (sauerbraten, assaultcube ... )
are still unusable.

AlienArena behaviour is quite interesting, and could be helpful.
As it starts, it plays its logo animation painful slowly at one
frame at second, but it ends quickly.
The main menu is really smooth it plays animations in background
fine and has a great reactivity.
Any sub-menu instead, makes the whole input and output lag and
becomes unusable (it's so hard point at any option, starting a
game becomes impossible)
The main menu, and the sub-menus seems to be the same on a first
look (same animations, etc) but there is some difference that
could be the key to solve all this issues definitely.

Also, I get some slowness with 2d acceleration that i solved
almost by disabling EXAPixmaps
by filling /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-radeon.conf with

Section "Device"
Identifier "r"
Driver "radeon"
Option "EXAPixmaps" "off"
EndSection

Let me know if this work also for you.
Maybe it could be also better in your case, since seems like
a lot of performance issues are related to the x86_64.
Do not give up hope

@AndyRTR
What about letting ati-dri provide both gallium and old
modules in different paths, so choosing which one to use
could be done by application with
LIBGL_DRIVERS_PATH=/path/to/driver appname
? It could be appreciated since a lot gallium users
encounters issues like this.

And what about --enable-gallium-llvm? I read it would improve
performances for many cards. Are there tests with this in
the Arch environment? Cheers

ConnorBehan · 2011-04-14 04:49:14

Sorry it took me a long time to reply to this. Your .drirc file works perfectly for me when I try the Gallium mesa stack on new kernels (2.6.37, 2.6.38, ...). The framerates I get are also 350+ which is higher than the framerates I used to get with OpenGL 1.5. Of course there are still issues with the new kernel. Logging out of X is more than likely to freeze my system - a bug I thought I said goodbye to in 2008. I don't have any 2D acceleration problems. I tried turning "EXAPixmaps" "off" to see if it changed anything and it made my performance ~100x worse. Guess different options work for different people!

Thanks alot for digging up this info. Real initiative.

speps · 2011-08-06 00:01:57

Good news, adding pci=nomsi to the kernel line, solves the issue completely.
No blank output without the .drirc file, and a massive performance improvement.
Thanks to Alex Deucher for the useful comment on the related freedesktop bug report [1].

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33790

Last edited by speps (2011-08-06 00:04:28)

Arch Linux

#1 2010-11-27 14:30:14

[SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#2 2010-11-28 09:18:16

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#3 2010-12-06 03:49:53

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#4 2011-02-01 00:32:28

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#5 2011-02-03 03:16:18

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#6 2011-02-03 08:21:31

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#7 2011-04-14 04:49:14

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

#8 2011-08-06 00:01:57

Re: [SOLVED] glxgears (or any opengl app):fully black window

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