The Cost Of ATI Kernel Mode-Setting On Fedora 12

[bugmenot]

What is the actual *reason* that it is slower?

Will color tiling be enabled with an update?

Thanks devs, you are doing an awesome job by the way.

[logic]

RS690M (ie. onboard Radeon X1200-series) is still totally unusable with KMS as shipped with Fedora, unfortunately. Terrible artifacts start showing up as soon as GDM makes an appearance, and it degrades from there until the system is rebooted, or the desktop locks up and has to be kicked over the network.

[lordmozilla]

just a note :

The line for KMS FC12 is red for the entire article. Then suddenly when you only have 2 OSs (FC12 KMS and FC12 UMS) the OS that has been the red line for the whole article changes...

Makes it look confusing.

[hybridr6]

Hmm yet another fact finding failure, we do ship r600 with kms by default.

3D isn't but thats easy to get working.

Ok good, thought I was the only one that noticed KMS was on by default...

[AdamW]

ufaogros: they never said it was news. They said they were benchmarking it.

Phoronix: looking whether you get the graphical boot or progress bar is not the perfect test for KMS, as it also depends on Plymouth being able to find the graphical splash. If KMS is enabled but Plymouth has some problem displaying the graphical splash, it'll fall back to the progress bar but *at native resolution*. The resolution's the key - if you see boot at native resolution, either graphical splash or progress bar, KMS is enabled. If you see boot as the progress bar at console resolution (720x400, the resolution used for POST and DOS and stuff like that), KMS is disabled.

[AdamW]

one more for phoronix - blindfrog is correct to note that this is being worked on even now. You may want to try with this Koji build of the ATI driver:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142974

this build of Mesa:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142633

this libdrm:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142111

and this kernel:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142993

and see how that combination performs.

[Peter_Cordes]

mplayer -vo gl2

mplayer -vo gl2 is only for video resolutions higher than the max texture size of your openGL stack. mplayer -vo gl is better when it works. I use

vo=gl:yuv=2:swapinterval=1:lscale=1:cscale=0 in my ~/.mplayer/config

(gl looks better than xv when up-scaling. Less chroma blockiness, I've found.)

[DoDoENT]

one more for phoronix - blindfrog is correct to note that this is being worked on even now. You may want to try with this Koji build of the ATI driver:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142974

this build of Mesa:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142633

this libdrm:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142111

and this kernel:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=142993

and see how that combination performs.

Well done! Excellent job! +200 FPS on glxgears. So for now, we are at 900 FPS without composition, and 700 FPS under kwin composition.

So 200 down, at least 1000 to go (I hope one day this driver will accelerate glxgears up to 3000 FPS on my graphics card, as fglrx used to do).

[hobbes]

I own a X1600pro AGP. Since Kernel-Modesetting introduction, XV playback took an enormous hit. As of today, I simple cannot playback x264/720p content (at least, nothing with a length of 5+ minutes) without hogging my CPU time. It gives an impression that is leaking somehow memory, consuming my CPU as time goes by.

I must say that these x264 files are part of a collection and used to play without major problems before KMS/GEM/DRI2 introduction.

Also (this is new) on Fedora 12 ( tested on release day) and Ubuntu Lucid (My actual OS) using KMS (ON) + AGPMODE (8x) compiz, while is on, turns the system unbearably slow. I mean, even a click on the gnome menu takes seconds to actually happen.

These issues are known to the devs?

PS: I'm using radeon, mesa, etc from xorg-edgers PPA and AFAIK those packages are up-to-date.

[AdamW]

dodoent: glxgears is not a benchmark, it's not even anywhere close. It would be a much better idea to test with something more resembling real world use than three extremely simple non-lit, non-textured, rotating shapes. Phoronix's own benchmarks are probably the best thing for 3D testing on Linux, actually. Try those.

hobbes: on a quick search I can't find a report of that problem in Fedora or freedesktop.org Bugzilla, or Launchpad. You might want to file a report at fd.o or Launchpad, I guess. Have you verified that it works OK if you disable KMS (nomodeset)?