Re: [gentoo-user] Xorg 7.0+composite+radeon OSS drivers+radeon9200se : X cpu usage sometimes rockets to > 80%

["Richard Fish" <bigfish@asmallpond.org>]

On 10/10/06, b.n. <brullonulla@gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you *really* want eye candy, try using beryl and emerald from the
> > portage-xgl layman overlay. ;-)
>
> Yes, I investigated it. But it seems my card is not so well supported by
>   XGL (If you have different experiences let me know) and XGL eye candy

Yeah, I'm not a fan of Xgl either, but I am of AIGLX, and I was under
the impression that the open source radeon driver had good support for
AIGLX.  I'm using nvidia, so I had to wait for the 9xxx driver release
before I could use it... :-(

> is (still) not what I was looking for, at least as for what I've seen
> (I'd never use wobbly windows and rotating cubes, sorry). The little,
> subtle effects of composite are enough.

You can disable most of that of course if you want.  If all you want
is shadows and transparencies, you can configure just those plugins.
I find the task switcher that displays live images of the windows, and
the scale effect (move the cursor to a corner of the screen and all
windows shrink and tile on the screen, and then you click on the one
you want to switch to) to be the most useful, although I could watch
my windows wobble and jiggle all day!
> > I am pretty sure though that xcompmgr and friends (kcompmgr) are dead.
> > Bugs I've reported against KDE 3.5's compositing issues have been
> > closed with "WONTFIX" and comments that indicate this.
>
> That's interesting. Can you point me to a link?

Hmm, I seem to be a bit confused with my bug reports [1] and stuff
I've read elsewhere.  But google around a bit for xcompmgr and read
what others are saying, and consider that xcompmgr hasn't seen any
significant work in over 2 years [2].

> I would not like to be forced to change WM. I'd like to have the same
> effects, no matter what WM I'm running. Composite runs independently of
> the WM - why isn't the same for XGL?

For simple things like shadows and transparency, that could be done
independently of the window manager.  But for more complicated
effects, like the task switcher, or being able to animate window
operations, or flash windows that want attention, or the desktop cube
thingy, you need tighter integration with the window manager.

-Richard
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