clutter_init causes segmentation fault

[martin.langhoff]

On os8, yum install control-center ; gnome-control-center dumps core. Investigate when possible.

We don't ship control center, but it may be a symptom of a wider problem, may be of value to some deployment or tester.

Tested on OS8 build.

[martin.langhoff]

It links against libcheese, which uses clutter.

[dsd]

Hijacking this ticket to cover this case and others (e.g. cheese, #11803, #10586 has the stack trace).

We aren't expecting Clutter to work at the moment - no 3D/GL support in our graphics drivers on any laptop - but it is probably a bug that it fails so harshly (segfault).

[dsd]

The segfault is fixed in cogl git, commit 125c31a70b5238eb8ab0c59ea8790b196be58dd8. Now it exits with a message explaining that GLX support isn't available, and that clutter init failed. Marginally better :)

[dsd]

I discussed this with clutter developers on their IRC channel. Summary:

clutter does require cogl, which uses OpenGL. We don't have any OpenGL support in our images (either software or hardware based).

Installing mesa-dri-drivers installs swrast_dri (a software OpenGL implementation). On x86, this works (slowly): totem and cheese come back to life, but perform badly (unusable).

On ARM, this doesn't work due to LLVM issues (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=829020). Falling back to the non-LLVM swrast, totem and cheese work but perform terribly (worse than unusable). (note that glx is currently disabled in xorg.conf - this must be enabled before testing)

The reason for bad performance is that totem and cheese both use clutter for video display. They do this because it means more video processing is done on the GPU (on systems with 3D accel) and it is also nicer API-wise. This means that we lose out on our hardware-accelerated video playback, it all goes through software (i.e. through the mesa software OpenGL implementation).

The developers explained it was a conscious decision to focus on cards with 3D accel, hurting platforms without 3D (even if they have good Xv). So it seems unlikely that they would readd Xv support.

[martin.langhoff]

So this is a dep for totem, cheese... and gnome control panel. We can work around totem and cheese to an extent, and performance in those 2 is important.

g-c-p, OTOH, does not care about performance.Currently, we cannot manage any advanced network settings under gnome. Does g-c-p work -- or how do I test it?

[Quozl]

runin also warns of a failure relating to libgstclutter, but it is not high impact, it only messes up logs at this stage.

[svu]

For the record, what is the currently recommended way to deal with wireless connections in GNOME desktop? g-c-c is not even installed (reasonably).