Ubuntu
nux package

  1. Bug #926859
  2. Comment #7

Comment 7 for bug 926859

Revision history for this message
Stéphane Graber (stgraber) wrote :

Another use case for you I just got reminded of, LTSP (that ships in Ubuntu Alternate).

In the past we had two categories of thin clients:
 - These that support 3D acceleration over the network (intel based mostly)
 - These that don't

The first would get compiz and unity-3d the other would get unity-2d. This was all fine and we could have somewhere between 70-80 sessions like that opened on a regular server as unity-2d wasn't using much resource and compiz with GL over the network was offloading quite a bit to the thin client, making it pretty lightweight too.

Now, doing similar tests with llvvmpipe, we're pretty much going from 70-80 sessions down to 10 or so, because of the very high CPU and bandwidth requirement that comes with doing all the nice flashy stuff on the server rather than the client and then sending all that over the network. That's for when we can actually get a unity session opened, most of the time, we just get half the panel rendered and it gets stuck there.

Don't get me wrong, I find llvmpipe extremely interesting and I've been looking forward to that for a while, but that's something that should be opt-in, not a default. We have unity-2d and it works really quite well, I see no reason to stop using it and instead running compiz on software rendering.

I'd think making the llvmpipe stuff optional, using a gsettings key or option in the .desktop or whatever would be fine for everyone. People who want llvmpipe will be able to flick that switch, others will get a nice, fast and quiet experience using unity-2d on their non-3D capable hardware.

Some people asked on IRC "why don't you just select unity-2d", well, the problem is that you don't have a choice on a live media, it's always booting in unity 3d and needs the fallback to unity-2d. Currently, forcing to unity-2d requires a hack at boot time in the initramfs... As for LTSP, sure we could change the default session, but that'd be bad as a lot of recent thin clients can actually run compiz with hardware acceleration just fine. I really believe the fix needs to go in unity-support-test.