Today I have upgraded my notebook to 4.11.0. Almost everything worked out of the box, the only exception was kwin's compositing support. Looking at ~/.xsession-errors I could see those messages: OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL renderer string: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series OpenGL version string: 2.1 (3.3.11672 Compatibility Profile Context) OpenGL shading language version string: Driver: Catalyst Driver version: 2.1 GPU class: R700 OpenGL version: 2.1 GLSL version: 0.0 X server version: 1.12.4 Linux kernel version: 3.10.6 Direct rendering: no Requires strict binding: yes GLSL shaders: yes Texture NPOT support: yes Virtual Machine: no kwin(17322) KWin::checkGLError: GL error ( Init ): "GL_INVALID_ENUM" kwin(17322): OpenGL 1 compositing setup failed QObject::connect: Cannot connect (null)::resetCompositing() to KWin::Compositor::restart() kwin(17322): Failed to initialize compositing, compositing disabled For some reason kwin does not detect that my notebook's setup is direct rendering capable. After some research I have found out that setting those two environment variables make kwin work with direct rendering: export KWIN_DIRECT_GL=1 export KWIN_COMPOSE=O2 kwin --replace & KWIN_COMPOSE=O2 means to use OpenGL2 according to kwin's wiki page and by the message above kwin was trying to use OpenGL1. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Run kwin-4.11.0 with a notebook with ATI HD4570 card and catalyst drivers ati-drivers-13.1_pre897 (legacy drivers). Actual Results: kwin does not detect that the card is direct rendering capable. Expected Results: kwin should detect that the card is direct rendering capable and enable compositing. kwin-4.10.5 works without problems.
Created attachment 81728 [details] Output of 'qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.supportInformation' when kwin fails to detect direct rendering
Created attachment 81729 [details] Output of 'qdbus org.kde.kwin /KWin org.kde.KWin.supportInformation' using KWIN_COMPOSE=O2
this should be determined by opengltest/opengltest.cpp and that file was last touched Sat Oct 13 10:33:38 2012 +0200 What's the ouput of aticonfig --get-pcs-key=LDC,ReleaseVersion *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 323527 ***
evolucao ~ # aticonfig --get-pcs-key=LDC,ReleaseVersion String: 8.771-100825a-104565C-ATI
> String: 8.771-100825a-104565C-ATI That explains it. opengltest.cpp // Enable direct rendering for AMD Catalyst driver 8.973/8.98 and later. But we'll detect 8.771 Did you update/change catalyst/fglrx as well? Interim? Is it now the legacy driver (but was the "regular" one previously)
No. Until yesterday kwin-4.10.5 worked with this setup and the only things I recompiled/updated from yesterday were all KDE and hddtemp packages. Some week ago I updated my kernel from 3.4.54 to 3.10.6 and because of that I had to recompile fglrx but kwin-4.10.5 continued to work after that. I am using the legacy drivers for more than a year now. This particular version (ati-drivers-13.1_pre897) was first installed in February of this year, by that time I was running kwin-4.10.1 according to my logs. By what you wrote it kwin should not be enabling direct rendering for my driver for a long time. I really do not know why it was working before.
Two possible explanations: - you had KWIN_DIRECT_GL=1 globally exported before - kwin_opengl_test could not be found before (is supposed to be in /usr/lib/kde4/libexec) - in that case we "guessed" direct rendering was right (since it's for the nvidia blob, MESA, virtualbox and the newer fglrx drivers) Other i don't know. Can you still check the 4.10 package contents / installation (did you eventually change the user, use a test user?)
I think the second explanation is more likely. I do not have the 4.10 packages anymore. Gentoo deletes them after upgrading. I did not test with a different user, just my user. I have just tried to recompile kwin-4.10.5 but I would have to download some other packages and I do not have time for that right now.
tip for future: You can use FEATURES="unmerge-backup" in your make.conf