GNOME 3.8 released [LWN.net]

GNOME 3.8 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 10:27 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: GNOME 3.8 released by ovitters
Parent article: GNOME 3.8 released

Yeah, I did read the release notes. In fact, I knew low animation mode was coming in 3.8 even before that.

However, that is not enough. There is no valid reason to insist on 3D rendering when no such thing exists on the platform. Somehow, 3D and animations have become essential in Gnome, when they should be used only when they work better.

Furthermore, even when doing trivial things, like scrolling e-mail in Evo, running top etc., gnome-shell is consuming huge chunks of CPU on my VM. The terminal interaction is visibly slower, for instance. Not to mention that shell gobbles up 300 MB of RES there. This slows the system down significantly. I know everyone will wheel out their favourite theories about emulators and JITs. Fact: on my remote VM, Gnome fallback is usable (been using it for work since day one and Gnome 2 before that). Shell is not.

And all that before mentioning all the shell UI silliness, like lack of visibility and basic customisability, as a result of RFC1926(6) implementation.

I am not displeased no matter what. I am displeased because something that worked will be broken, without a real replacement or workaround.

As for using a different desktop, I see the Gnome philosophy of getting rid of existing long term users (which helped chase many a bug) is well and truly alive. Well done.

PS. My criticism of Gnome developers specifically does not apply to Evolution developers. I have been impressed on more than one occasion by Milan and others.

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GNOME 3.8 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 10:49 UTC (Thu) by sheepdestroyer (subscriber, #54968) [Link]

I want to point out that it is not only a problem on vm or remote systems.

My recent core i7 (sandybridge) has all the horsepower needed but effectively consumes more watts with 3D acceleration on. I Use Fallback mode not for it's "classic" layout but to conserve battery on my ultrabook.

This is i think a valid concern, especially if targeting mobility.

GNOME 3.8 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 12:28 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

There is no need for your system to requires more power, no matter if GNOME uses "3D" or not. Only the most basic stuff is used. It should barely make an impact.

In practice, it does. But that is something that should be fixed at the right level. Unfortunately despite GNOME being out for years, not much has happened with drivers/X/whatever causes this.

Reference point is to try Windows 7+ on the same system. It uses "3D", but overall it'll likely have a better power usage while needing more from the "3D" bits.

GNOME 3.8 released

Posted Mar 29, 2013 22:39 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> In practice, it does. But that is something that should be fixed at the right level. Unfortunately despite GNOME being out for years, not much has happened with drivers/X/whatever causes this.

What is happening is called 'Wayland' and 'DRI 3.0'.

With X Windows as the display manager you have to have write out buffers multiple times, copy textures, do texture conversions, and do multiple rendering passes for things like 'server side decorations' if you want to have a composited desktop... for each time the display needs to be rendered, which is usually each screen refresh. You can't fix this without breaking X.

With the current drivers they have different sorts of video memory management schemes, which are not optimal from a security and performance perspective. Live and learn.

With Wayland and DRI 3 drivers all that copying/writing/converting and incrementing/deincrementing should be replaced by simply passing a file descriptor from the client application to the display server. So instead of shuffling around MBs of textures around you end up replacing it all with the copying of a couple bytes.

GNOME 3.8 released

Posted Mar 28, 2013 12:24 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

Ignoring some bits and the sarcasm:
There are some big problems in the memory usage of GNOME shell (3.6). That is partly fixed in 3.8, but can only be really addressed in 3.10. Reason behind it was: 1) bug in bindings (clutter references weren't freed), 2) mozilla/gjs/something making it impossible to regularly run auto garbage collection (which was done in earlier versions) 3) mozilla/gjs/something causing #1, which had is now worked around (in 3.8).

Also in 3.6 some stuff was done in process which should've been done out of process (was not enough time).

I'm sort of surprised that not more people picked up on this though. The huge memory usage in 3.6 is quite noticeable. Though maybe some distributions added custom patches to deal with it.

Note that I'm not a dev and might have gotten some details above wrong.