Re: [Avogadro-Discuss] [Avogadro-devel] Avogadro Manuscript

[My Th <re...@gm...>]

Hi!

Nice paper. Egon already raised the point I had in mind - GPL vs BSD
licensing discussion (seemed unfinished, I have missed the reasoning
which led to the push for BSD, sounded like intent to close Avogadro and
sell it).

C , 2012-05-17 17:08 +0200, Egon Willighagen rakstīja:
> 
> Fair point, indeed. It's running 'i915'... that's kind of something I
> miss in Debian GNU/Linux... clear suggestions on what less free but
> better performing modules I can use.

For better or worse, Intel works very closely to upstreams for their
graphics drivers. They don't have proprietary binary blobs. The best
performance is offered by their newest drivers with SNA (sandybridge
acceleration architecture; works also for older generation GPUs despite
the name). The downside is that to get the newest intel drivers all
graphics stack has to be updated, that includes kernel, libdrm, mesa, X
server and xf86-video-intel (with SNA enabled).

I'm not familiar with the state of Debian in this respect. I'm using
Gentoo with linux 3.3, xorg-server 1.12 and the rest of the components
building from git. I think most of the SNA work was merged in mesa 8.0
and xf86-video-intel 2.18 (since mesa 8.0 intel driver supports OpenGL
v3.0, not sure if for all generations tough), at least Debian unstable
seems to have them.

I have Intel Sandybridge CPU with iGPU and I would say that it performs
reasonably well. For graphically heavier tasks (applications) I'm using
discrete Nvidia GPU through Bumblebee (I have one of those Optimus
laptops with Intel iGPU and Nvidia dGPU). At this point stability is the
bigger issue, performance for Intel will improve with time and also for
Optimus will improve even further with Prime project.

As for Avogadro's crashyness, in my experience it is not uncommon at
all. The biggest problems have been with automatic hydrogen adjustment
when drawing (those should be fixed by now) and sometimes completely
mysterious crashes. Lately I'm using git version of Avogadro, so I'm
probably seeing different set of issues as stable. Tough my usage of
Avogadro is not heavy enough to give it serious testing.


Reinis