[Wine] Wine causes X server restart
L. Rahyen
research at science.su
Wed May 13 21:41:25 CDT 2009
On 2009-05-13 (Wednesday) 12:43:25 Clontarf[X] wrote:
> vitamin wrote:
> > Clontarf[X] wrote:
> > > Starting wine or a wine'd program causes an immediate restart of the X
> > > server, returning the the gdm greeting/login screen.
> >
> > Buggy video drivers.
>
> What I was thinking. Any known stable/non-buggy ATI drivers that you know
> of?
There is no such a thing (at least not yet). Many people who try to use ATI
Linux drivers eventually come to conclusion that ATI drivers for Linux are
unstable and have big amount of major bugs. And I learned this from my recent
experience too. Instead of telling you "ATI drivers are bad" I will tell you
whole story so you can understand better why I have such opinion about ATI
drivers.
I always knew that ATI cards have bad drivers so I never purchased them.
However, few months ago I received a gift - yet another computer to my house;
the computer wasn't so bad except it was equipped with ATI card. I decided to
use it (the computer) for SolidWorks: it doesn't work on Wine so you need
Windows to use it. In the past I used VMWare and using separate computer
for this purpose (to run programs that doesn't work on Wine yet) is an
improvement and working on multiple computers is very convenient with good KVM
switch.
Obviously, first I tried new computer "as is" with ATI card under Windows. It
wasn't bad... it was horrible. Even when I opened very simple model in
SolidWorks performance was bad - about 1-3 FPS (at least 30-60 FPS was
expected) with very heavy tearing (VSync didn't work). Even worse, when
SolidWorks window was maximized there was heavy corruption in 3D viewport and
even in small window there was a lot of artifacts.
In fact, only games on Windows worked well with ATI card... Everything else
worked bad or didn't worked at all. Obviously, I decided to replace ATI
card with something better. So I took NVidia card from my another
computer (running Linux) and temporally inserted ATI card into it just in
order to see how it will work with Linux.
Since computer I took the NVidia card from was used mostly for non-gaming
activities and tasks, I thought maybe ATI card can handle that. I tried to
install ATI driver for Linux... There was a lot of issues in the ATI driver
installer such as strange conflicts, problems with compiling kernel module,
segfaults, and some other issues. After wasting some hours I solved all of
them: I used solutions published in some forums by other people so all
problems I encountered was known bugs in ATI driver installer. And that's was
just ATI driver installation...
Then I tried to use it (the driver). It is well known that with ATI card in
Linux you can forget about gaming but I decided to test this myself and now I
can confirm this: all my games I tested with ATI card in Linux (and I tested
only games that work with NVidia card perfectly) didn't work with ATI card for
one or another reason: major graphical glitches (so technically game runs but
looks ugly), major bugs in the kernel module (so I had either "immediate
restarts of the X server" like you do or hard crashes of whole system). Yes I
know there is some games that do work with ATI cards very well but this
doesn't change the fact that number of games you can run perfectly with ATI
card in Linux is much less than number of games you can run perfectly with
NVidia card. So I didn't test ATI card with games in Linux any farther because
this was pointless.
Computer where I tested ATI card with Linux have three X sessions running: one
mine, one for my brother and third one for playing games and watching movies.
Obviously, there was at least few switches between these sessions per day. And
in my case ATI card (its driver) failed to work even for pure 2D tasks: major
bug in ATI kernel module lead to system hard crash once or twice (!) per day
(usually when trying to switch between X sessions). After few days of testing
I learned that ATI card is useless (at least for me) in both Windows and
Linux.
Conclusion (from my personal experience): ATI card can only satisfy your needs
only if you use Windows and all 3D applications you run in Windows are games or
very simple professional 3D software. In any other case you may and probably
will encounter major bugs in ATI driver even on Windows. On Linux this even
worse: even if you manage to run some games or other 3D applications there
will be a lot of games that run perfectly with NVidia card but run badly or
not at all with ATI card. Even worse, ATI card is very unstable (1-2 hard
crashes per day in my case!). As a result, I didn't find any use for my ATI
card (X1600) and after few days of bad experience replaced it with much better
NVidia card (and NVidia offers much better drivers for their cards; also
NVidia drivers for both Linux and Windows work well and are stable).
Your best option is to buy NVidia card. If you have no money to buy NVidia
card, your only hope that at some point in the future there will be better
drivers for ATI cards. I know that ATI put some effort trying to improve ATI
Linux driver but they need to put much more effort before I ever decide to
even consider to buy ATI card.
For now ATI driver for Linux is far from perfect (and from my personal
experience I discovered that their Windows driver is much better than Linux
one but far from perfect either) and this is especially obvious when you
trying to use Wine for games on computer with ATI card.
More information about the wine-users
mailing list