End of year Xorg status rant

[Beeblebrox]

Hello,

I've been using FreeBSD-11 for a little over 2 years. I had upgraded very early to take advantage of the Radeon-KMS drivers. Since the version was HEAD, I resigned to my fate of strugling through some very serious display problems; now that 11 is Release, I'd like to make some headway on this problem. Below listed issues make the FreeBSD Desktop experience a complete Hell for me.

What I'm seeing:
* None of the web browsers work well. Firefox crashes immediately. Epiphany, Midori & Chrome display a litle better but crash prety quickly. Recently installed qupzilla-qt5, which at least is semi-stable but lines on page text get mixed in to one another resulting in text-on-text - also clickable items are not where they show up on the page. The recent Seamonkey update is working the best but has same problem as qupzilla-qt5, and if I wait a while the page gets re-drawn correctly. Best browser is Opera, works and stable, but scares the s**t out of me when I use it since it's old and probably vulnerable. If I add a script-blocker extension to it (likes of no-script), Opera also stops displaying the page.

* Window Managers have mixed stability. Lumina crashes within 15-20 secs of coming up; so does openbox/gnome. Gnome-3/gnome-classic is semi-stable, but most text is garbled and you have a tough time navigating around. All Gnome-based apps have it the worst and display strange things even when used in other WM's. Enlightenment, which was broken for a while seems fixed and is performing to some degree. Fluxbox is the most stable.

* Java-based apps behave horribly, must are very quick to crash. VirtualBox for example - It's near impossible to use the GUI and navigate a VM Guest because the mouse pointer jumps around like its on amphetamines. Several other java apps have problems with inability to display text (blank lines instead), slow response to mouse clicks or flickering.

* All Desktop/WM's have a "stick mouse" problem, where mose refuses to move incrementally (usually near app fram borders) so I end up jerking my hand like some mental case to accelerate the mouse out of its stickieness.

* All apps now come with a default yellow foreground setting, but that's the least of my problems :p (nice screenshot of these problems attached). A  part of the issue might be libGL, as a recent java app crash log highlights (log file also attached).

* When I switch to vt-console (alt-F1-8) and back to desktop (Alt-F9), sometimes  the screen starts to flicker like mad and if there's a terminal at the foreground the machine starts inputing an endless series of "0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0" that I must stop with ctrl+c

* Another possibility I thought of is that the Linux layer in src (COMPAT_LINUX32) is not happy with the driver code. The reason I bring that up is that while testing sysutils/grub2-pcbsd, grub drops to grub-console (path to mount root) and the keyboard/screen output is very unresponsive to the point that it takes 1/2 minute for screen output to change.

* All in all, the problem can be best described as an inability to properly refresh/redraw the display; which brings me to the end of this rant.

Thanks for reading, merry Solstice and a happy New Year to all of you. 


SYSTEM:
* FreeBSD 11.0-STABLE #0 4370756a792(stable/11): Fri Dec 30 09:48:35 +03 2016
* All ports installed through poudrire built packages.
* GPU: RS880 [Radeon HD 4250]
* Possibly relevant Xorg.log output:
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev
(II) Loading /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/libfbdevhw.so
(EE) LoadModule: Module fbdevhw does not have a fbdevhwModuleData data object.
(II) UnloadModule: "fbdevhw"
(EE) Failed to load module "fbdevhw" (invalid module, 0)
(WW) Falling back to old probe method for vesa
(WW) VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support


-- 
FreeBSD_amd64_11-Stable_RadeonKMS
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