File dialogs don't work on Xubuntu 18.04 inside VirtualBox about nextpnr

[thomask77]

It seems to be a VirtualBox (5.2.14 on Win10) problem..
I just tried it on both a native machine and in VMware, and everything works.

With VBox 3D acceleration disabled, I have the problem as described.

With VBox 3D accelaration enabled, nextpnr doesn't work at all:

thomask@vbox-xubuntu ~ 
$ nextpnr-ice40 --gui
OpenGL Warning: glXChooseVisual: bad attrib=0x186a0, ignoring
OpenGL Warning: glXChooseVisual: bad attrib=0x186a1, ignoring
OpenGL Warning: vboxCall failed with VBox status code VERR_BUFFER_OVERFLOW

OpenGL Warning: glXChooseVisual: bad attrib=0x186a0, ignoring
OpenGL Warning: glXChooseVisual: bad attrib=0x186a1, ignoring
[1]    2178 segmentation fault (core dumped)  nextpnr-ice40 --gui

Interestingly, nextpnr seems to be the only Qt5 application that does have these problems.

[mmicko]

Hi,

Was not able to reproduce your problem. Is this fresh installation of 18.04, or some upgrade ? Thing is that we use QT5 for GUI functionality and not GTK directly. If you can try at least doing update/upgrade packages and then recompile nextpnr again with new and try again ?

[eddiehung]

I'm actually running on a new, clean, Xubuntu 18.04 build right now and running the latest master 0a52133 and while I do see the same Gtk-Message as you, I still get a file dialog from which I can select a project.

As @mmicko says, would you mind rebuilding and retrying?

[thomask77]

Very strange observation:

• If I zoom in 10-15 times (therefore less FPGA elements fit on screen), I can open the dialogs.
• If fully zoomed out, the file dialogs won't open.

So it's likely the high number of drawn elements in the FPGAViewWidget triggering some problem when running in VirtualBox :/

[eddiehung]

Thanks for trying all these combinations @thomask77 -- this is all useful information -- and I'm sorry that none of what you tried fixes it.

Is it possible to use a VMWare instead of VBox then? As you can imagine, fixing it just for VBox isn't a priority for us so it may take some time to get there.

I'm also going to rename the title of this issue to reflect these findings.

Alternatively, I believe nextpnr supports Windows natively -- calling @mmicko to confirm.

[mmicko]

Right, OpenGL is not that greatly supported on VMs so there could be some issues like that.
But @eddiehung is right Windows native support is working, and you can use VS2015/17 to build it or even mingw (following linux build process)

[thomask77]

Thanks for your great support!
I think, I can live with the zoom-out workaround for now.