Poking at Mesa
Posted at 2006-02-12
Some weeks ago I started playing Neverwinter Nights, to put my shiny new r300 graphics card to some use.
NWN is working quite well with the r300 DRI driver, but it used to crash on me in some scenes, without any error message.
aet, one of the authors of the free r300 driver told me NWN would reopen stderr to /dev/null, which kinda explained why I didn't see any error message :)
Should anyone else want to track down bugs in Mesa with NWN, I prepared a tarball with a LD_PRELOAD'able library that can be used to stop NWN from that retarded behaviour.
aet has got a fix for that NWN crash, I guess it will hit CVS soon :) Here's the bugzilla entry for the bug.
It's also noteworthy that I also fixed my first real bug in Mesa yesterday, which was noticed while trying to investigate the NWN crash \o/ Now that I have looked at Mesa/OpenGL driver code for some days, it doesn't look as scary as it used to :)
Update
Fixed the URL for nwn-fix_stderr.tar.gz.