real, REAL bad performance with dri2 and ati kms

[amphigory]

My laptop with RV530 is rather fast with KMS/DRI2. Firefox scrolling is great. Compiz effects (scale, cube, etc.) are not sluggish at all. I am, though, building libdrm, mesa, and xf86-video-ati from git.

[pedepy]

My laptop with RV530 is rather fast with KMS/DRI2. Firefox scrolling is great. Compiz effects (scale, cube, etc.) are not sluggish at all. I am, though, building libdrm, mesa, and xf86-video-ati from git.

would you mind sharing which 'versions' of git you are using, what kernel and uh i dunno maybe some xorg options you may have ? ..

if you read the original post you see that i also do use git so i dunno ..


i guess i could point out that the system usually *appears* snappy from the start, only sometimes it feel 'freeze' especially when maximizing windows using compiz, or playing hd video. it's really hard freezings too, for a second or so nothing will respond, not even the mouse cursor. when this happens, the processes usually indicate a usage of 35-50% for X, but not usually much more than that (i mean, it's not like it's a 100%)..

[amphigory]

would you mind sharing which 'versions' of git you are using, what kernel and uh i dunno maybe some xorg options you may have ? ..

I'm running Debian Unstable with libdrm, mesa, and xf86-video-ati Debian packages frozen (held) so apt doesn't clobber my git install.

My last git pull is about 5 days old. Ancient. :-)

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/snapshot/mesa-f096cc7dc1cdae1698eb7a340cd8c7f5ea0b1166.tar.bz2
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm/snapshot/drm-2.4.15.tar.bz2
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver/xf86-video-ati/snapshot/xf86-video-ati-f4407962cd7b272e0860319f11f6a6583ef226c2.tar.bz2

DRM options
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-radeon-experimental-api --enable-udev

Mesa options
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gallium-radeon --with-dri-drivers=r300 --with-state-trackers=dri,glx

xf86-video-ati options
./configure --prefix=/usr

Kernel from source (kernel.org)
eherr@slick:~$ uname -a
Linux slick 2.6.32-rc3 #1 SMP Tue Oct 6 06:28:00 PDT 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

eherr@slick:~/packages/src/kernel/linux-2.6.32-rc3$ grep  DRM .config 
CONFIG_DRM=y
CONFIG_DRM_KMS_HELPER=y
CONFIG_DRM_TTM=y
# CONFIG_DRM_TDFX is not set
# CONFIG_DRM_R128 is not set
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=y
# CONFIG_DRM_MGA is not set
# CONFIG_DRM_VIA is not set
# CONFIG_DRM_SAVAGE is not set
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON_KMS=y

Minimal xorg.conf

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Radeon"
#    Driver      "radeon"
    Option        "UseFBDev" "on"
    Option        "AccelMethod" "EXA"
    Option        "DRI" "on"
    Option        "ColorTiling" "on"
    Option        "EnablePageFlip" "on"
    Option         "DynamicPM" "on"
    Option        "ForceLowPowerMode" "on"
#    Option        "ClockGating "on"
#    Option        "AccelDFS" "on"
    Option        "BackingStore" "off"
#    BusID       "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

HD video is still problematic with mplayer on single core. I haven't tried multithreaded ffmpeg options yet. This weekend perhaps.

*** Note *** My xorg.conf is crap. Cleanup required but it works.

[amphigory]

Also... there are some compiz effects (Blur Windows? Bicubic Filter?) that I remember REALLY slowing things down. Possibly due to OpenGL extensions used being rendered in software?

[pedepy]

i was able to pin down some of the really bad performance issues on using the kde4-window-decorator and compiz. using emerald free's up ALOT of cpu.

firefox scrolling is awful still, however, and although it is probably partitially expected from this early incarnation of kms/dri2 that surely could use from optimization work, overall performance is also lower than using the old dri methods.

i'll keep playing around, hoping that 2.6.32 will bring performance improvements on it's own.

[Vash63]

If I recall correctly, somebody mentioned Firefox was slow because it abuses the XGetImage interface, which has not been optimized in the KMS case.

Is this a radeon problem then, or does it happen with intel KMS also? Just wondering what project I should be following to see when it gets fixed.

[rob2687]

I just tried the Xorg-Edgers packages again and man is it sexy smooth on an x1900. With the default Karmic packages there was some weird scrolling thing in Firefox. What would happened was the middle click scroll would lag horribly and the FF window would become unresponsive while it was stuck scrolling very very slowly. There was no way to click out of it since the whole window was unresponsive. Usually I ended up killing the process. Very annoying until now.


All done with nothing but a stock Karmic install and Xorg Edgers PPA added. I love it. It's even more awesome because in the past we would have been left having to compile mesa, xorg and all those libs just to try out the latest stuff.

[d2kx]

Well, xorg-edgers don't have the new Xserver in (not even 1.7 which is stable), but other than that, it's a fantastic PPA that I use a lot for testing the opensource stack :P