nVidia driver/Saucy: Intermittent delayed update running Ecere IDE

[Jerome St-Louis]

Running the Ecere IDE, we often get delayed updates.

e.g. hovering over a menu selection will not highlight until the mouse is moved to the next menu item, and the item previously highlighted will now be highlighted. Other obvious examples include the project files tree view whereas the wrong row is highlighted, even the wrong collapse/expand states.

This is happening in the latest Ubuntu Saucy as of today (August 28, 2013) using nVidia driver on an ASUS G75V laptop equipped with a GeForce GTX 670MX.

NVIDIA Driver Version: 304.88

This is Ubuntu Saucy 13.10 current as of today (August 28, 2013 , 7:40 PM EST)

To reproduce this you can install the ecere-ide:

sudo apt-get install ecere-sdk

launch the ide (Ecere IDE, under Programming)

Create a dummy new project (Project/New, fill in name/location, OK), play with the project files tree view, right click the project to pop up the Build Menu and often hovering over the first menu item (Build) will not highlight until hovering above the second menu item.

Reference: our Ecere bug on our own bug tracker:

http://ecere.com/mantis/view.php?id=987

aaronp in #nVidia said:

"It's a longstanding issue with GL-based compositors. The tools to fix it were added only fairly recently so I don't think any of them take advantage of them yet. The new fence sync stuff allows you to make GL wait for X rendering inside the GL server (i.e. the GPU) rather than waiting on the CPU."

Might be useful info:
http://fishsoup.net/misc/wm-spec-synchronization.html

Might be related: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/861268
https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/269904 (Intrepid though?)

This is using the Ecere X11 driver which renders to a pixmap using XRender ( e.g. XRenderFillRectangle) and will then do a XCopyArea() from the pixmap onto the window.

Our Ecere X11 display driver: https://github.com/ecere/ecere-sdk/blob/master/ecere/src/gfx/drivers/XDisplayDriver.ec

Please don't hesitate to contact me should you require any additional details or would like to discuss this problem with me.

Thank you.

-Jerome

[Jerome St-Louis (jerstlouis)]

The same work around as for https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/compiz/+bug/861268 works

( Utility->Workarounds->Force full screen redraws (buffer swap) on repaint )