What is the current state with mesa-freeworld drivers?

Hi guys,

a bit general questions, but:

  1. What is the current situation with mesa-freeworld drivers for F38?
  2. What is the suggested way to have AMD drivers installed with support of additional codecs?
  3. Do I need install any separate packages to enable H.265 codecs if I use non-freeworld drivers ?

The Problem:

  1. After swapping to freeworld and running update the system could not boot with message “oh no something went wrong”. Basically as described in reddit post

  2. I am not really a “linux guy”, I just decided to switch from Windows to Linux, because I don’t like where the Windows is going for in terms of privacy et cetera. I am willing to learn how to use repos, build sources, but it becomes frustrating that simple update can break the system.

  3. For now I switched back to non-freeworld drivers and was able to boot again. My main workflows are related to movie and photo-editing, and I just trying to make editors open :woozy_face:

2 Likes

It is possible that you did not upgrade all the mesa packages at the same time.

Recently I upgraded and all the mesa packages got updated except mesa-dri-drivers because of conflicts with the mesa freeworld packages. Then my window manager for xfce would crash.

Then I downgraded all the mesa packages and the display manager no longer crashes. As I don’t have Nvidia stuff in my computer I don’t need the mesa freeworld packages. After removing those I could upgrade the mesa packages and everything work OK. Perhaps the rpmfusion testing repositories have a compatible freeworld package that would fix the issue for now.

So with all -freeworld packages that RPM Fusion provides, there will always be a bit of a lag. They can only be built once the Fedora packages have hit the updates repository—this means that people will always get the non-freeworld bits from Fedora first, and then once the -freeworld counterparts have been built and pushed by RPM Fusion, they’ll reach users a bit later.

This usually does not create issues because the -freeworld packages are tightly linked to the Fedora ones—dnf etc. will complain of broken deps and not update these.

I think what’s happened with the mesa-freeworld packages is that the link between them and the Fedora packages is not strong enough, and so one can get a partially updated set of packages.

I think this is being discussed here now:

https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6664

2 Likes

This has been a bit back and forth. Currently the freeworld packages needs exact version match to the Fedora version.

The problem is that the individual Fedora version of the mesa packages does not all have the necessary strong version requirement as they should have. Therefore you can end up with incompatible mesa packages on your system leading to some programs to malfunction.

2 Likes

Thank you, at least now it is clear what is happening :slight_smile:

The next version will fix this issue.

According git log https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/mesa.git

Author: Pete Walter <pwalter@fedoraproject.org>  2023-04-25 17:08:29
Committer: Pete Walter <pwalter@fedoraproject.org>  2023-04-25 20:38:47
Parent: e3ab6721150e67992304edbcae56da73f04b87f6 (Revert "Tighten mesa-va-drivers recommends again (rhbz#2161338)")
Child:  87ea46fe6b92d5cd7b9389b6526eefa92942777f (Update to 23.0.3)
Branches: f37, remotes/origin/f37
Follows: mesa-7_9-0_6_fc14
Precedes: 

    Add missing inter-subpackage requires (rhbz#2187726)
    
    Whenever we require a library from one of the mesa subpackages, use
    fully qualified requires when doing so to ensure that the packages are
    always updated in lock step.

2 Likes

I did most of the work to fix this and everything was ready on Thursday last week. RPMFusion maintainers just need to push mesa-freeworld 23.0.3 stable, and that’s it. They ignored my request to have it pushed ASAP. I’m sorry.

More in:

and
https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6664#c4

2 Likes

Thank you for your efforts and clarification. It sounds like you have done your best and community should appreciate it.