NVidia Composite Extension Bug

September 2008

1. You need to be concerned if ..

• Your system has an NVidia graphics card and you want to use a "recent" (circa 2008) version of the proprietary NVidia driver
• You are using a "recent" (circa 2008) version of Xorg X, as found, for example, in Mandriva 2008 or 2008.1.
  

2. What are the symptoms of the bug?

• Windowing operations such as open, minimize, resize, ... applied to windows opened by an xforms application (such as xvs or DV) are excrutiatingly slow.

3. What's the fix?

• Explicitly disable the support for the (new and, clearly!, experimental) Composite extension built into recent versions of the NVidia drver:
  
  
• Following installation of the NVidia driver, execute
  
     % nvidia-xconfig --no-composite
  
  Alternatively, you can directly modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf to include a Section of the form
  
     Section "Extensions"
        Option              "Composite"  "Disable"
     EndSection
  
  Note that you must restart the X-server for the changes to come into effect.

4. Where's the bug?

• That's not entirely clear yet, at least to me.  Prime suspects, in no particular order, are
• The xforms package
• The NVidia driver
• Xorg's X