[Mageia-dev] Fwd: fallback mode

Tue Nov 6 10:07:08 CET 2012

On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 01:05:04AM +0100, JA Magallón wrote:
+> I have connected my Atom netbook to a big monitor, and it handles
+> perfecly the FullHD resolution. Gnome full mode works fine and fast.
+> Its an Atom N450, graphics are recognised as N10 or Intel(R) Pineview GM.
+> 
+> All this with the monitor as the _ONLY_ monitor active.
+> 
+> If I try to use it on a multi-monitor setup, X gives a message about non-tiled
+> framebuffer and gnome-shell is slooooow as hell, unusable.
+> Probably that is a hardware limit, or a bug, because it happens even if
+> the external monitor is a projector at 1024x768.
+> 
+> I was wating to do more tests to submit a bug....
+
+This might be a known driver/xorg issue. Various hardware either don't
+work, or gets slow if the framebuffer exceeds 2048 pixels
+(width/height/something). I'm not sure what the plan with that was, if
+that could be fixed still in xorg, or only in Wayland. I think it was
+fixable in xorg, but I'll have to check.
+
+In any case, the obvious status is that at the moment some people cannot
+run GNOME 3 and they have to rely on fallback mode. Debian suggested a
+method to detect this during installation time. I don't expect GNOME 3
+to suddenly be good enough for everyone in 3.8. This as many of the
+causes are not due to GNOME (bad drivers).
+
+-- 
+Regards,
+Olav
+