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NVIDIA Fixes Old Compiz Bug

Posted by timothy on from the mayan-long-count dept.

jones_supa writes NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz. When opening the window of a new application, it would go black or become transparent on NVIDIA hardware. There have been bug reports dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. An NVIDIA developer posted on Launchpad and said the NVIDIA team has been looking at this issue, and they also proposed a patch. "Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don't match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this," wrote NVIDIA's Arthur Huillet. The Compiz patch has been accepted upstream.

51 comments

  1. Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    This is exactly why I don't fuck around with this minor league OS. Years old bugs and usability nightmares. No amount of grass roots fanboi support can fix that.

    1. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by BlueMonk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, at least with major league OSes like Windows we never have to worry about decade-old bugs. And Windows 8.0 was the model of usability.

    2. Re: Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Those other OSes without bugs are much better.

    3. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      Nobody gives a shit if you don't use Linux. Just like I don't care if people smoke 4 packs of cigarettes a day. They are the ones that have to live with poor decisions and so do you. I know that I have it better than the windows world and that's all I need to know. You drink your poison and enjoy it, some of us know better. Linux isn't perfect it's just better than the alternatives.

    4. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Well, it won't make open source any better if you just go pointing out bugs in Windows.

    5. Re: Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Wootery · · Score: 1

      They tend not to be terribly feature-rich, though.

    6. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by juanfgs · · Score: 0

      Well, it won't make closed source any better if you just go pointing out bugs in Linux.

    7. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Luckyo · · Score: 1

      Gotta say, that is the first time I heard someone suggesting that using windows over linux is comparable to smoking four packs of cigarettes a day.

      Coming up next: Using windows over linux is like punching a kitten. Because hyperbole.

    8. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by AqD · · Score: 1

      For those who didn't follow the link and actually read it. It's an old security hole on 32-bit Windows

      F*** 32-bit. They should have stopped selling 32-bit version since Windows Vista.

    9. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by andydread · · Score: 2

      well it was because it's open source why a third party was able to find and fix the bug in the first place. Beats waiting on the proprietary vendor to get around to finding and fixing their problems.

    10. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by future+assassin · · Score: 1

      So you never use any third party software on your computer like compiz is? We all know those are bug free.

      --
      by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
    11. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Beats waiting on the proprietary vendor to get around to finding and fixing their problems.

      We also had to wait for two and half years for this open source bug to be fixed.

    12. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      More like kicking a kitten.

    13. Re:Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Gavagai80 · · Score: 1

      More having a pet lizard rather than a pet kitten.

      --
      This space intentionally left blank
    14. Re: Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You didn't have to wait, you could have offered a patch two years ago.

    15. Re: Linux - rock solid and bug free. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Windows 8 was a flop that they are trying to fix with version 10.

  2. Unity by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop

    You mean they got rid of Unity! Oh, darn.

  3. Yay! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I will rest at night and also half the day.

  4. Ok... so why is this headline news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How many thousands of bugfixes are commited each day in open source projects? Why is this worthy of a Slashdot headline? :P

    1. Re:Ok... so why is this headline news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is one of those bugs that generates thousands of comments and a big flame war. Everyone who uses nvidia and Ubuntu (ie easily over half of Linux users) has encountered this bug. Compiz is now maintained by Ubuntu and it was one of their changes in the 0.9 series which introduced this bug in the first place. They've been unable to fix if for about 5 years. But the really interesting part is that Nvidia finally stepped in and fixed it, even though it isn't their problem. Quite possibly because Ubuntu developers in their inability to fix it have constantly blamed Nvidia.

    2. Re:Ok... so why is this headline news? by nadaou · · Score: 2

      it's on the front page because other slashdotters voted the story up on the firehose. don't like it? go to the firehose and vote things down.

      at the risk of suggesting you must be new here, there is much less editorial input than you might expect.

      --
      ~.~
      I'm a peripheral visionary.
  5. Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1

    FUCK YOU!

    1. Re:Nvidia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Tjmax at 100C!!

  6. Sooo... by thebes · · Score: 0

    After reading the wiki article on Compiz, it seems to be the same animation/fluff shit Linux users got pissed off at Microsoft for including...?

    1. Re:Sooo... by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      After reading the wiki article on Compiz, it seems to be the same animation/fluff shit Linux users got pissed off at Microsoft for including...?

      What Linux users are pissed off at Microsoft for adding fluff? They must have sad and pathetic lives even by Slashdot standards, because you can turn all that stuff off.

      What Linux users get pissed off at Microsoft for is forcing fluff, like when you have to use a GUI tool to configure something. But they are getting much better about embracing the command line. The next Windows will supposedly have even better headless support.

      Compiz does do all the eye candy shiny shiny stuff. But you can turn features on and off atomically, and there is a great deal of configuration available for each feature. If for example you like many of the aspects of the OSX desktop, but some of the features bother you or you wish they worked a little bit differently, you can get the precise effect you're looking for with Compiz.

      Sadly, my favorite window manager (emerald) is not being developed any more, but between emerald, compiz, and avant-window-navigator it's possible to build a maclike desktop which actually works properly, and which has only useful eye candy like smooth moves (nice for seeing where windows go) and an Expose-like feature with no borders. That is, you can turn them off. And of course, mipmapped previews.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:Sooo... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As a Linux user I want to point out that I wasn't pissed of any less every time I had to uninstall Compiz, especially when Unity 3D made it mandatory and broke two legacy systems without warning. Moved from GNOME and Unity to Xfce since mixing Compiz and complex 3D applications was a sure way to trigger a crash in either Compiz itself or a driver.

      Difference to windows: right now (Windows 8) the only way to get rid of the fluff is by frezing the login process and killing whatever monster is used to render Metro (Windows 7 had an option to disable it, Windows 8 has a watchdog to keep it alive at any cost). On Linux I can choose a "lightweight" desktop environment and stay with it (XFCE for gnome lite, LXDE for kde lite).

  7. not slashdot worthy by ionymous · · Score: 1

    who cares?

    1. Re:not slashdot worthy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NVidia marketing cares for sure. Some intern just got brownies for the brand exposure. So, keep commenting :)

    2. Re:not slashdot worthy by Anne+Thwacks · · Score: 1

      It will take a lot more fixes than this for me to ever buy another NVidous product. I am not a Windows user, and their drivers dont work at all on other OSes..

      --
      Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
  8. Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by Qbertino · · Score: 1

    Compiz is the bug. The whole thing. Seriously.

    Rendering the desktop / ui with OpenGL is a very neat idea, and as far as I can tell Blender and Enlightenment have both achieved this very gracefully a long time ago, as has OS X.

    However, Compiz is an entirely different thing and in my book one of the most annoying bug-ridden additions to the FOSS desktop stack in the last 10 years. A buggy laggy piece of sh*t software, messing with my input, shoddy responsiveness with particularly annoying and not-very-useful animations (unlike OS X), freezing randomly after running to long, etc. And no, running a few days shouldn't be an issue for any piece of software.

    I don't know the next thing about OpenGL GUI building and acceleration, but Compiz is in perpetual commercial-software-beta state. Why it's even included, let alone a default in some distros is beyond me.

    Someone please kill this project off, replace it or replace the development lead. It's degraded the Linux experience considerably in my book.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
    1. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by DrXym · · Score: 2

      Compiz has to jump through the hoops of an arcane windowing system and deal with broken and sometimes proprietary GPU drivers. It's a miracle it works at all.

    2. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      Considering that there is no need to use compiz whatsoever on the Linux desktop I don't see how it could possibly affect your system if you don't wish it to.

    3. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      X might be old but its not particularly arcane and neither is OpenGL.

    4. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by DrXym · · Score: 1
      X is arcane. There is a strong desire to get rid of it because it's inefficient (network, CPU, GPU), filled with obsolete APIs that nobody uses and an increasing number of extensions designed to work around this brain damage.

      Hence the drive to replace it with Wayland. People who still need X can run X over Wayland.

    5. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by binarylarry · · Score: 1

      Sounds like someone's never written software for Xorg...

      --
      Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    6. Re: Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This

    7. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by caseih · · Score: 1

      You're free to not use and not install it.

      I use compiz on Fedora and CentOS with the Mate desktop. I don't do it for wobbly windows. I do it because it allows me to set up my desktop to work the way I want it to, and it increases the smoothness and perception of speed. Other compositing window managers like Gnome 3 just don't work the way I do. I like being able to customize compiz completely to my liking. I like my hot corners to do certain things, such as show all desktops, and show all windows. The compiz desktop expo viewer is just super slick and better than anything I've seen yet. You won't find any wobbly windows or gratuitous effects here. Everything I have on is to make my desktop work well and smoothly.

      I don't see how blender is relevant. Just because renders everything in its window with OpenGL doesn't mean it has anything to do with being a composite manager using the output from other apps and windows.

      Now with indirect rendering as a normal X11 extension, Enlightenment is a compositing window manager, like compiz or gnome 3's wm. And the future is, they tell me, with wayland, where these things will continue to exist as compositing managers.

    8. Re:Compiz is the bug. It needs to die. by Viol8 · · Score: 1

      I've been writing Xlib code for 15 years pal. Compared to other APIs its a piece of piss.

  9. dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    You assume everybody is keeping track of what's going on in the ubuntu world!

    1. Re: dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You assume everybody is keeping track of what's going on in the ubuntu world!

      uh... 12.10 would be the Ubuntu release from October 2012. The clues are all there.

    2. Re: dating back to Ubuntu 12.10 times?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NVIDIA has fixed a long-standing issue in the Ubuntu Unity desktop by patching Compiz.

      This means that the bug has been present until now, you dingbat.

  10. Compiz isn't part of the OS you idiot by Viol8 · · Score: 1

    Its just an eye candy window manager core for X Windows and is totally unnecessary and wastes cycles.

    1. Re:Compiz isn't part of the OS you idiot by juanfgs · · Score: 0

      wastes cycles.

      I should know, I've wasted 3 cycles with this crap, now I use fluxbox and I can ride all day without worrying about wasting my cycle like that.

  11. That's why I don't like Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    This is precisely why I don't like Ubuntu anymore. Arthur Huillet's analysis doesn't sound too complicated, then how come nobody at canonical bothered to look into it for years? And that's not the only bug like that. To this day my Ubuntu Laptop does a forced fsck on every single boot because it fails to umount the file system properly on every shutdown (google it, I'm not the only one). How come these things don't get fixed for such a long time?

    1. Re:That's why I don't like Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Probably because you fscked something up. I've never had that problem, or any problem, from 10.04 to 14.04.

    2. Re:That's why I don't like Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How come many other users have the exact same problem then?

    3. Re:That's why I don't like Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Btw, here's the bug

  12. If Windows XP were open sourced... by voss · · Score: 1

    The community could have fixed its problems years ago.

  13. Not fixed by Ubuntu by zdzichu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The headline gets it slightly wrong. Ubuntu (i.e Canonical) did not fix bug for at least three years.

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    :wq
  14. gtx 970 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe no they can go about fixing my Gtx 970.

    3.5 4

  15. go nvidia. by CloudDrakken · · Score: 0

    Awesome. Linux support is a wonderful thing and I celebrate their contribution (=