Dual screen greeter can break 3D acceleration
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Release Notes for Ubuntu |
Fix Released
|
Undecided
|
Andy Whitcroft | ||
unity-greeter (Ubuntu) |
Triaged
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
When booting with two screens (internal LVDS and VGA), lightdm comes up in a mode where it displays separate screen content on both displays (so no mirror mode). These screens seem to be arranged side-by-side regardless of the fact that (like in my case) the combined width can be greater than 2048 and that is not supported with 3D acceleration at least on that older i945GME graphics.
This results in very poor graphics performance and compiz using a lot of cpu cycles (which are rather limited on this Atom N270 anyways). Even worse, this does not get resolved when changing the setup in system settings to either only having one screen active or arranging them on top of each other).
WORKAROUND:
* Plug in external monitor after login (1)
* Boot with "video=LVDS-1:d" (2)
(1) Booting with only the internal screen and then plugging in the external one after login seems to handle this better (although I probably need to remove any previous config to get into a kind of vanilla state again). Also it seems to be ok when I had the dual monitor boot and lightdm coming up side-by-side, when unplugging the external monitor before logging in.
(2) This will completely disable the internal screen for that boot. It cannot be enabled through the settings dialogue.
Changed in lightdm (Ubuntu): | |
importance: | Undecided → High |
affects: | lightdm (Ubuntu) → unity-greeter (Ubuntu) |
summary: |
- Lightdm on dual-screens can break 3D acceleration + Duel screen greeter can break 3D acceleration |
Changed in unity-greeter (Ubuntu): | |
importance: | High → Medium |
status: | New → Triaged |
summary: |
- Duel screen greeter can break 3D acceleration + Dual screen greeter can break 3D acceleration |
description: | updated |
Changed in ubuntu-release-notes: | |
assignee: | nobody → Andy Whitcroft (apw) |
status: | New → Fix Released |
tags: | added: trusty |
Should we add something to the release notes? Maybe like this:
Some laptops or netbooks with older graphics can experience bad graphical performance when starting with a high resolution external monitor attached. The reason for this is that some graphics cards (like the Intel 945GSE for example) cannot support accelerated 3D graphics when the combined width of both screens exceeds a certain threshold (2048 pixels in the example above).