< Features
Software rendering for gnome-shell
Summary
Make gnome-shell work with software-rendering on most hardware
Owner
- Name: Adam Jackson
- Email: ajax@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 17
- Last updated: 2011-07-18
- Percentage of completion: 0%
Adam has patches
Detailed Description
Modern CPUs are in principle powerful enough to run gnome-shell and a full GNOME 3 desktop with software rendering. There's are plenty of bugs and broken optimizations in the software-rendering stack that make this currently not work.
Benefit to Fedora
Fedora gets to provide the same experience on more systems. In the long run, can phase out more components that are only kept alive because they are needed in the GNOME 3 fallback mode.
Scope
Fixes are needed in mesa, X, llvm, ...
How To Test
- . Locate hardware that only supports GNOME 3 in fallback mode with F15 or F16
- . Install the F17 desktop spin
- . Verify that it provides the regular GNOME 3 experience, not fallback mode
User Experience
Users will get the regular GNOME 3 experience, not fallback mode, regardless of wether their hardware supports GL or not. Note that software rendering does require sufficient CPU power for a good experience.
Dependencies
TBD
Contingency Plan
Fallback mode will still be around for a while, and if software rendering does not work out, or only works under certain circumstances, we will adapt the blacklisting mechanism that is currently used for fallback mode to only try the full experience when it has a chance of success, and continue to fall back to fallback mode in problematic cases.
Documentation
TBD
Release Notes
TBD