I’m spending this lovely Saturday morning to go through some bugs in Debian. Actually I set my eye on one special bug, Lenny RC bug which in few days will be 1 year old, and then this fact and figure as one ripped the stitches of my mouth, and thus I started writing this post … I want to talk few things over in general Linux development and possibly give definition to this highly cryptic title.

EXA vs XAA on i965

But before that let me tell you a little story that should’ve been told long time ago.  When I got my x300, I was “thrown” on a lot of new stuff. One of the most interesting things is that i965 was blacklisted in Compiz (and as I see it now, it still is).  So as I configured everything back in the day, last step was to configure Compiz. I was very surprised to see i965 to be blacklisted, nevertheless this was none of the problems that will follow.

EXA is default, EXA is supposed to replace XAA, so here’s the paradox. With that same default EXA you’ll run into numerous problems, from basic scrolling being slow, to whole compiz being incredibly slow, to the point of not being usable. Of course you can spend hours and hours tweaking and hacking to make it run any faster, maybe fix scrolling speed, you’ll make it, but the I believe the “core” of this problem is in something else. Also there is a good side to side of this story, you can play videos, however if you run them in fullscreen they’ll go just incredibly slow, no matter really what plugin you set as your video playback.

Setting video playback plugin to “No XV” didn’t do anything, neither did Xshm or any other option. But then I said, hold on, why is i965 in Compiz blacklist again?

more “Compiz, Lenny, x300, i965, exa, xaa, xv …”