As of tomorrow's rawhide [1], gnome-session will no longer treat llvmpipe as an unsupported driver. This means gnome-shell will run even on hardware without a native 3D driver, including virt guests. There are probably bugs! I've done some quick tests on the hardware I have handy and in kvm, and things do appear to work. You, lucky contestant, might have a different experience. If you do, bugzilla is standing by and ready to take your call; please file against the 'mesa' component and set me as the assignee. In the meantime you can still get to fallback mode through the Graphics section of the System Info control panel. Very little performance work has been done on this yet - like, literally, none - though there are some things you can do [2]. Outside of virt you will probably want to tell your driver to use ShadowFB in xorg.conf. This will disable hardware acceleration, but in exchange you won't be doing very slow GetImages all the time to get textures loaded into the compositor. In virt, however, the double-buffering done by ShadowFB just slows you down, so you're probably best off switching your driver to NoAccel instead. The vesa driver should get this right for you already, as should cirrus under virt. Beyond that, most of the performance work is going to require new kernel and Mesa features. For details, please see: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_rendering If you're interested in contributing to this effort, please follow up on dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. [1] - In particular, you'll need these packages or newer for things to work: mesa-*-7.11-9.fc17 cogl-1.8.2-4.fc17 gnome-session-3.3.1-2.fc17 [2] - It's something of a policy decision to get some of these things "right" by default, because you're deciding to throw away hardware accel on old chips, and some people who aren't using gnome-shell might think that's worth keeping. We'll figure something out, I'm sure, but contributions are most welcome. - ajax
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