Hi,

I just installed KDE 4.5.1 on a new laptop with an integrated Intel GMA:

Code: Select all

lspci|grep -i graphics
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)

(Apparently it's on the CPU, which is Core i7)

The problem is that with compositing enabled, things don't repaint. For instance, when I first logged into KDE, I had the splash screen shown for a while until I clicked around and found that plasma was actually running, for example if I clicked the bottom-right corner of the display, I'd get the panel cashew menu.

After another re-login, plasma is painting, but context menus and plasma pop-ups don't always work. Here's a screenshot with the menu and calendar open:



How can I get this fixed?

wow that's nicely broken. It looks like blur might be involved, so first try to disable that effect.

have you:
- if available, tried a different Intel driver ?
- changed to xrender or tried changing the other "advanced" options of desktop effects?
- disabled all effects and re-enabled them individually to determine if a given effect is the cause?
----- blur is known to cause performance issues

OK, disabling blur seems to have fixed the context menus, but plasma is still broken:

Never mind. It just doesn't show anything when it doesn't work instead of the gray box.

Following google01103's suggestion, I tried disabling all the effects, and then enabled just the Translucency, and then repeatedly clicked the "K" menu button - about one in ten times, the menu did not appear, but if I clicked on the area where a menu item was supposed to be, the application would launch.

The driver I'm using is the in-kernel i915.

Also Xfce's Xfwm4 works with compositing (shadows, translucency) without a problem.

So I take it that my card is currently unsupported?

you might try the kwin mailing list https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kwin
or the kwin irc channel #irc

have you tried turning off "direct rendering"? and or using xrender instead of opengl for "composting type"?

this may help explain (or not) http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2 ... paces-4-5/

google01103 wrote:have you tried turning off "direct rendering"? and or using xrender instead of opengl for "composting type"?

this may help explain (or not) http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2 ... paces-4-5/

Yeah, I read that via LWN today.

mgraesslin, if you have or could make any testcases to reproduce these problems, I can run them and see what works and what doesn't. After that, they could be sent to whoever is responsible for the drivers.

Has this issue been resolved? I don't see a solution mentioned in this thread and this is the only place I've seen this issue even mentioned.

I was running Kubuntu 10.04 with KDE SC 4.5.1 and everything was working fine. I even noticed that the effects had become a bit "snappier" so I could use the bilinear texture filter instead of nearest neighbor. Something in the KDE config became corrupted so the splash screen stayed up. Removing .kde/share/config "fixed" this but, since I was going to be reconfiguring the desktop, I decided to upgrade to Kubuntu 10.10.

Now, I'm having the same problem with menus and popups not painting with compositing on. Like Alec, it's not consistent (they usually won't, but sometimes they will paint), the popups still work (e.g. I can still launch applications from the application launcher and cancel my logout even when the options aren't visible), and all turning off blur accomplishes is making the menu/popup completely invisible instead of just showing a blurred box (I'm using the Air theme for plasma).

Unlike Alec, I'm running Kubuntu on an eeepc 1000he, so I have an Intel 945GME.

I updated to KDE SC 4.5.2 (from 4.5.1) pretty quickly, so I don't know if it was the switch from KDE 4.5.1 to 4.5.2 or the switch from Kubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 that did it. Martin Graesslin's blog post doesn't really clear anything up for me. It mostly talks about the blacklist which doesn't seem to be the issue. I tried adding my graphics card to the blacklist as described in one of the comments and the only visible change was that it disabled blur which, as I mentioned, was working fine in Kubuntu 10.04 with KDE SC 4.5.1 and just makes the popups completely invisible. Also, it sounds like the blacklist is mostly an issue when changing from KDE SC 4.4 to 4.5, but my issues came up entirely within 4.5's life cycle.

One thing that I just noticed is that setting the Qt graphics system to X11/XRender instead of Raster seems to fix the problem in Plasma, but application menus still won't always appear.

Another thing that I've noticed in this whole process is that, with compositing turned off, it always switches to automatically grouped windows even if "Switch to automatically grouped windows immediately" isn't checked. But, that's another bug entirely.

Have you tried with a new user, and disabling Blur under that new user?

I just added a new user (as new_user, the default name) through System Settings. I then created a minimal .kde/share/config/kwinrc file with:

[Compositing]
Enabled=false

which I hope just made sure that compositing was disabled (the first time I tried this, compositing with blur was enabled by default). When I logged into the new account, I switched to the desktop workspace (i.e. instead of the netbook workspace), checked the box to enable effects (but they were still suspended), turned off blur (enabled by default), then clicked apply to resume effects without blur enabled.

Plasma seemed to work fine. Then I opened rekonq and started right-clicking around the new tab page. The menus came up more often than not, but sometimes they still only drew the shadow and not the menu itself. This would be more usable, but still frustrating when it didn't work, and unsatisfying to lose blur after having it working perfectly in KDE 4.5.1 under Kubuntu 10.04.

I just opened a bug at launchpad for Kubuntu here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/681564

I am facing the same problem. My description of the problem it a lot poorer than yours, but I think that will do. I added a comment to this page, so that we don't have too much duplicated effort.

I found that a lot of compositing problems vanished when following advice found here: viewtopic.php?f=111&t=91663

I can now succesfully use blur, use expose functions, have taskbar thumbs enabled, use openGL window switching (although my favourite cover switcher appears partially broken) on my MSI Wind, which have a Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

For me, the problem seems to have solved itself some time ago with a driver update (before it, I couldn't even play simple games - I thought that it was Intel graphics were that bad!)

I've now installed KWin 4.6, and it works perfectly.