Possible regression in Mesa 24.2.8 GL drivers: sluggish X11 behavior

ecto

Hi,
I'm writing this, because this problem has caused me quite a bit of time of my life.
I recently installed the Vulkan drivers to test out some of the emulators supporting it. By that I updated a lot of packages, including the Mesa GL drivers to 24.2.8.
I then started to notice, that emulators depending on X11/GL (like supermodel, bigpemu) started to behave very sluggish. After some digging I found that the ~/.local/share/X11/Xorg.0.log file filled up with lots of entrys of modeset(0). Some internet digging resulted in this thread. Here, a possible solution in downgrading and holding the drivers to 23.2.1 is proposed. I did that, and the problems are indeed gone.
Now, it seems when reading through the Github and other threads, that not everyone seems to be affected (and the error - so far - was not reproduced officially.
I just wanted to make you aware, that there might be problems in the recent Mesa GL drivers under X11 and that there is at least a temporal solution.

MoleMan

I've personally experienced Dosbox-Staging crashing any time I attempt to launch it as a result of the move to Mesa 24 (I had previously installed Mesa from backports, then had to remove and reinstall Mesa packages to revert to 23). Of course, now that 24 is the default version, I don't know how to do that.

What is the correct way to downgrade the packages from 24 to 23.2.1? I've searched, but didn't find any method that worked for me.

ecto

@MoleMan You can look up the Github thread I linked in my fist post. There is a small shell script that can accomplish that. I myself had some trouble with it, because I'm using multiarch and had to downgrade both arm64 and armhf.

Edit Better make a backup of your SD card before going into that whole downgrading process... ;)

Edit 2 The thread I mentioned above only links to this one with the script.

mitu

@MoleMan said in Possible regression in Mesa 24.2.8 GL drivers: sluggish X11 behavior:

I've personally experienced Dosbox-Staging crashing any time I attempt to launch it as a result of the move to Mesa 24

I can see the issue with Staging, there's a SDL issue opened for a similar error during initialization of the video renderer (EGL), however downgrading SDL to an older version doesn't have any effect. I haven't downgraded Mesa since other SDL2 apps work fine, but it seems related to the upgrade and perhaps will be solved when the issue opened on the RPI repos will also be solved.

EDIT: a new version of the Mesa libs in RaspiOS has been released, but they don't solve the Dosbox issue. I can confirm that using the old version, Dosbox works fine.
FWIW, here's my little script used to dowgrade the libs:


ver=23.2.1-1~bpo12+rpt3
arch=arm64

for i in libgbm1 libgles2-mesa-dev libglx-mesa0 libgbm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev mesa-vulkan-drivers libglapi-mesa libegl-mesa0 libgl1-mesa-dri; do
 wget -c https://archive.raspberrypi.com/debian/pool/main/m/mesa/${i}_${ver}_${arch}.deb
done

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

NOTE: run this from an empty folder, since it will download and bulk downgrade the packages. These are the packages that have been upgraded on my Lite system, but if you're running a desktop system there might be more - you can check in /var/log/apt/history.log and find the upgrade entry with the list of packages.

MoleMan

@mitu The script worked perfectly for me. I'm back on Mesa 23 and Dosbox-Staging is up and running again. Thanks.

Nash

What is the command line to check gl mesa version ?
Since few days some of my wine games are lagging in fullscreen, seems like framerate is limited to 20 fps.

mitu

@Nash You can use apt to get the info of a with a certain mesa package:

apt info libglapi-mesa

or print the list of packages with dpkg and filter using mesa:

dpkg -l | grep mesa

Nash

@mitu Thanks,

It was mesa 24.2.8. I downgraded with your script and my wine games run fine again in fullscreen.

It also resolve black screen issue in lr-flycast/lf-flycast-dev on pi5.