Hi Steve-
Please open an issue with the details of your machines that crash when trying to use accelerated graphics. We thought that we had addressed all or almost all of these cases.
Our current plan is to shift our backend graphics away from the OpenGL/Cairo engines and use a third-party library like libbgfx. This may remove any option for Cairo rendering in the future, so it'll be good to work out the kinks.
And for the peanut gallery: of course we check libraries and query features before using them. The segfaults happen when libraries return values that they don't actually support. Mesa/X11 is a big culprit here on Linux and older bulit-in intel drivers on Windows do the same. The way we do better is to get detailed system reports when segfaults happen. If folks just sit on these issues because fallback works for them, then we'll never fix them.
Seth
On Mon, Jan 10, 2022 at 8:55 PM Steven A. Falco <stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:stevenfalco@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
In the past, when running eeschema or pcbnew for the first time, it would ask if I wanted to try accelerated graphics. That no longer seems to be the case - I don't get that dialog.
I don't know if the dialog was intentionally removed or if it is a bug, but I think it is an issue either way, because the default is now accelerated graphics, which results in segfaults on some machines that I have here.
Today I was trying some experiments in a new VM, and I couldn't launch eeschema, either from the main app or standalone. It would segfault before putting up its window. Then I remembered that I had had that problem in the past when I was trying out accelerated graphics. But in the past, I was able to select fallback graphics from that initial dialog.
In this case, my only way to fix the situation was to copy the json config files from another machine that was already configured for fallback graphics. That worked. KiCad was now usable in the VM.
Most people won't have a set of suitable json files laying around to get past the segfault, or even know to try that. Thus, I think the initial dialog needs to be there, or perhaps the default should be changed to fallback graphics.
Steve
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Seth Hillbrand
*Lead Developer*
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Long Beach, CA
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