New frames come up black in Jaunty

[Russel Winder]

Even though I bet this report is going to be marked as a duplicate, I am posting it. From what I can see this problem has been present for over two years and it is still present.

I am using Epiphany on Jaunty with an NVIDIA graphics system and all the non-free drivers loaded. With a number of Epiphany frames open suddenly the next frame opens black. Making the frame smaller generally leads to it being rendered properly. Resize and it goes black again.

Even though the other versions of this bug report have been marked as issues in linux-restricted-modules-generic, I maintain this is a problem for compiz. The black content behaviour does not happen with metacity, it should therefore not happen with compiz.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

 status invalid

It's still not a problem in compiz, even though it's a problem *for*
compiz. The problem is, and remains, in nVidia's OpenGL implementation,
where the bugs have been filed.

This is largely fixed in the nvidia-glx-180 drivers, however.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

I think I disagree that it is not a problem in Compiz. Even if the fundamental problem is in something being relied on (in this case the NVIDIA drivers), Compiz should be checking for the problem and dealing with it with the user in a way that makes sense to the user. The current behaviour of simply putting up a black screen is not user-friendly.

I think I also disagree with the problem being "largely fixed". I have the 180 drivers installed and activated and I get the problem with Epiphany and Emacs quite regularly.

[Chris Halse Rogers (raof)]

On Tue, 2009-06-09 at 10:23 +0000, Russel Winder wrote:
> I think I disagree that it is not a problem in Compiz. Even if the
> fundamental problem is in something being relied on (in this case the
> NVIDIA drivers), Compiz should be checking for the problem and dealing
> with it with the user in a way that makes sense to the user. The
> current behaviour of simply putting up a black screen is not user-
> friendly.

I'm not sure if it's actually possible to detect this error. Maybe it
is. But even if it can be, pretty much the best Compiz could do in this
case would be to refuse to create new windows.

> I think I also disagree with the problem being "largely fixed". I have
> the 180 drivers installed and activated and I get the problem with
> Epiphany and Emacs quite regularly.
>
Hm. That's news to me, but I haven't been following the bug
particularly closely; my nvidia card has always had too much vram to
really manifest the problem. The changelog for the 180 series drivers
certainly included "fixes for GL_EXT_texture_from_pixmap in low-memory
situations", which is the problem which causes the anomalous compiz
behaviour.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

I guess we just have to leave the first point then. Sad but seemingly unfixable.

Could the second point be a BIOS settings issue? There seems to be hints that some people have gotten round this problem by having different BIOS settings.

Not sure how to check the vram in use so as to compare with your set up. The NVIDIA X Server Settings reports my GeForce 6200 as having 256MB memory. System Monitor reports Xorg as having 105MB memory and 315MB virtual memory with 105MB resident.