ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware rendering

[Matthew Rezny]

The following reply was made to PR ports/156405; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Matthew Rezny <mrezny at hexaneinc.com>
To: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Cc:  
Subject: Re: ports/156405: x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati driver: no hardware
 rendering
Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2013 05:56:45 +0200

 This is a very puzzling problem that really irks me.
 
 I had perfectly working R600 DRI on very similar hardware (HD4870)
 as well as a laptop with similar video (HD4200), but some Xorg
 update at least a year ago killed it. Why the regression without any
 apparent attempt to fix? The last it worked properly was the point in
 time when setting WITHOUT_NOVEAU allowed r600_dri.so to be compiled.
 All worked perfect and the newer Xorg brings no new features from a
 user point of view, only new problems.
 
 I could almost understand if there was some actual problem with the
 R600 DRI, but there isn't. Starting X results in the software
 rasterizer, which makes KDE painfully slow . However, running certain
 apps I get hardware rendering. i.e. OpenArena loads r600_dri.so instead
 of swrast and the framerate in timedemo clearly slows hardware
 rendering is in fact working. Why can a game get hardware rendering but
 the rest of X can't?
 
 Considering how far off KMS support is, I would hope this issue would
 have been addressed by now. From my viewpoint, it looks like some
 stupid and likely trivial bug that causes Xorg to load swrast instead
 of r600_dri, but I haven't the time nor patience to dig through the
 mess that is Xorg to attempt to figure it out.
 
 Considering the recent suggestion of flipping the WITH_NEW_XORG switch,
 which itself is very ambiguous, I must re-iterate a previous
 suggestion: Instead of having a single set of ports for Xorg, PLEASE
 make some versioned ports for the older versions. This would allow the
 "legacy" hardware (as in what I think most of us are actually using) to
 continue to function in a useful fashion. Considering the precedent of
 version-named ports (e.g. postgresql, mysql, bdb, etc), I cannot fathom
 why this is not done for Xorg/DRI/Mesa.