XOrg 6.9 crashes immediately with 9629 + Composite extension

[chukemolte]

Hello, I've found helpful information in this forum before, but not this time, so, here goes...

If I enable the Composite extension in xorg.conf, the server crashes within seconds, every time, before it has a chance to display much more than a cursor. Sometimes it freezes the display and is unresponsive to input devices, but is still usable remotely. Because of the immediate crash, I could not run nvidia-bug-report.sh while the broken X was running, so I'm providing both a log generated after the crash on a broken configuration, and a log generated when X is running, but with Composite disabled.

By the way, I've seen some claims that XOrg 7.1 is required for this to work in the first place, while others have claimed that 6.9 is fine. Even the NVidia documentation, if I recall correctly, is not consistent about this question.

[netllama]

You need Xorg-7.1 (or later) if you wish to use Compiz/Beryl. You should still be able to use the Composite extension though. Which window manager are you trying to use when X crashes?

The backtrace of the X crash in your bug report doesn't appear to be going through the nvidia driver. Does the crash occur if you're using the 'nv' driver instead of 'nvidia' ?

Thanks,
Lonni

[chukemolte]

Ah, that clears up the version question, thanks netllama. I'm guessing the GDM greeter does not start Compiz before login, so that is probably not the source of the crash...

My goal was to see if I could run Compiz without XGL by using the new drivers, but you say not on XOrg 6.9, so that makes continuing to pursue this purely academic on my end. IIRC, switching to the nv driver and back is something of hassle in SUSE 10.1, so I'm not sure when I might get around to trying that. I am content to wait for the SUSE 10.2 release in a month if need be. Considering that, how interested are you in hearing the result of using nv?

What you and other readers might be more interested in knowing is that on SUSE 10.1 (I have a Gnome-based install, XGL and Compiz from the SUSE update repository), the system automatically attempts to use Compiz for the window manager when GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap is present, as is the case with the 9629 drivers. Of course Compiz fails to start on XOrg if the Composite extension is not enabled, leaving the user with no window manager running.

I'll spell that out for the readership... The options I face are:
a) stick with driver 8774, OR
b) hack the system scripts (Xsetup IIRC) such that it does not start Compiz instead of Metacity when using XOrg in the presence of GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, OR
c) manually (or in some session startup script) start Metacity after logging in with XOrg, OR
d) use XGL at all times, OR
e) upgrade to XOrg 7.1 and see what happens
In all cases except (e) I would leave Composite disabled, as it was before the driver upgrade.

I myself will roll back the driver to 8774, since that's an easy path to having both XOrg+Metacity and XGL+Compiz available, and it saves me from looking into an issue with font scaling on the GDM greeter that appeared with 9629.

[chukemolte]

Follow-up:
SUSE 10.1 online update repository now contains a patch to the gnome-session package to fix the behavior I was talking about. You can now use the latest NVIDIA driver (9631) with XOrg+Metacity without jumping through any hoops.