ume-launcher and glx - unusable when fast user-switching
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu Netbook Remix Launcher |
Won't Fix
|
Undecided
|
Neil J. Patel | ||
| natick |
Triaged
|
Medium
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
If you use "Switch User" to open up a new session on a different VT, glx is only active on the first-started VT, meaning that the second user doesn't have access to direct rendering. This is fine usually, and only affects 3D-heavy applications and Visual Effects etc.
However, ume-launcher looks like it has features that even with Visual Effects disabled depend heavily on hardware rendering. I assume it's the icon title highlight and grow/shrink on mouseover and the launch feedback (icon spin and overlay "loading" message).
This means that when the second user is switched in, trying to do anything in ume-launcher is EXTREMELY slow to the point in that its unusable effectively - Xorg spikes to 100% CPU whilst it tries to do the rendering without using glx direct rendering.
Is it possible to selectively disable the glx graphical elements of ume-launcher, in other words to still use the layout of the launcher but just disable the launch feedback and mouseover graphical eye-candy, so that when direct rendering isn't available the performance of the launcher app (and the rest of the UI) is still high?
At the moment, due to the CPU load without direct rendering it's impossible to use Netbook Remix's arguably most core component for more than one user simultaneously.
| Neil J. Patel (njpatel) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in netbook-remix-launcher: | |
| assignee: | nobody → njpatel |
| status: | New → Triaged |
| Rod Hull (iwantmyjelly) wrote | #2 |
| Changed in natick: | |
| importance: | Undecided → Medium |
| status: | New → Triaged |
| Neil J. Patel (njpatel) wrote | #3 |
| Bill Filler (bfiller) wrote | #4 |
| Changed in netbook-remix-launcher: | |
| status: | Triaged → Won't Fix |
The launcher is written using Clutter, which is a GL canvas. I'm not sure what difference reducing the animations would make, the performance would still be horribly slow (like processing clicks etc) as the entire launcher is using software rendering.
Also, I'm not sure how to detect that we're on software rendering. If this is possible, I don't mind making some builds to see if disabling the animations helps.