kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

On 03/24/2017 01:11 AM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been thinking about my intent to make KiCad fall back cleanly to
> Cairo when OpenGL isn't available. From what I can see, there are
> certain situations where trying to use OpenGL causes crashes that appear
> very hard to prevent.
> 
> I really want to do something about this - they're hard to prevent, but
> I still don't think it's acceptable to crash out on the user. What if we
> compiled a small test binary that just tried to load an OpenGL canvas?
> We should be able to test for functionality pretty easily by starting
> that executable, and any crash would be confined to its own process. Is
> anyone opposed to this? I know it's not the cleanest solution, but I
> can't think of much better.

Hi Chris,

There are tests that gracefully switch to Cairo when OpenGL backend
fails, but they work well only if application reaches the point when it
can make valid OpenGL calls. I have noticed there are failures that
crash the application before there is a chance to react [1]. Running the
test as a separate process should help here.

Running the test in the KiCad launcher will not fully solve the problem,
as we still have standalone apps that need the test as well.

I like the idea of crash sentinel. At least it prevents the situations
when KiCad cannot be run after a kernel/video driver update, because it
loads OpenGL by default.

Regards,
Orson

1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1675498

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