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  • #41
    Originally posted by Pallidus View Post
    gilboa a 3ghz pentium 4 with 1 g of ram is more than enough to run any 3.x kernel distro, I have older laptops that for instance have nvidia but I'm able to run stuff like lubuntu just fine.... with ati ones you are stuck in 2007/08

    If you re-read to OP, *very* old (mid 90's) graphics cards are being dropped, such as the Virage S3 (95) and ATI Mach 128 (96?).
    I doubt that many machines from the mid-90's (mostly laptop, I presume; desktop can have their graphics card replaced for 10$ on ebay) are capable of running modern distributions.

    - Gilboa
    oVirt-HV1: Intel S2600C0, 2xE5-2658V2, 128GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX1080 (to-VM), Dell U3219Q, U2415, U2412M.
    oVirt-HV2: Intel S2400GP2, 2xE5-2448L, 120GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX730 (to-VM).
    oVirt-HV3: Gigabyte B85M-HD3, E3-1245V3, 32GB, 4x1TB, 2x480GB SSD, GTX980 (to-VM).
    Devel-2: Asus H110M-K, i5-6500, 16GB, 3x1TB + 128GB-SSD, F33.

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    • #42
      Originally posted by Pallidus View Post
      I don't need to read that I have the laptops here and the live cd's and even a monkey can tell you that going from 300 fps in glxgears in suse 11.1 and u8 to 25 fps in ubuntu 12.04 means something zigged instead of zagged and the only difference I can perceive is the EXA / XAA thing

      if XAA didn't provide any acceleration it certainly didn't lag the whole system like exa did...
      It seems you are blaming EXA for something it not directly to blame for.

      I ask they guy who added support for EXA to r-128 which is older than both of your cards if he noticed any 3D preformance drop after implementing EXA.

      His response:
      Not according to glxgears. With page-flipping on I get ~690fps with XAA and EXA.
      It seems there is something else that is causing your issue.

      See: http://www.smallperturbation.com/r128-exa#comment-30 for more information.

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      • #43
        timothy I don't know, I lack the skill set to go deep into xorg and find out what is causing this...

        All I know is that if I use a distro with an old kernel that had XAA as the default acceleration method, everything runs smoothly, glxgears about 300 fps, if I use anything with EXA is unusable about 28 fps glxgears

        agp, kms etc etc seems to be set fine and EXA and XAA thing seem to be the only change




        I am far from being the only one affected by this, I have red the same in lots of forums, spanish/english and portuguese of users complaining when they made the switch from ubuntu hardy heron to ubuntu 9 or 10... all running first generations integrated ati had huge perfomance drops.


        I know the cards are 8 years old and crap, etc etc etc but my specific model the igp 345m was even used in sony vaios of 2004/5...

        I am sorry but ANYTHING post 2002 SHOULD, nay, HAS to run any 3.x kernel distro with openbox or ice or e17 JUST FINE.

        I wish there was some sort of switch in x.org that if detects r100 or r200/rs200 r300 etc it switches back to XAA or shadowfb or whatever else that at least allows you to run linux

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        • #44
          Originally posted by Pallidus View Post
          I wish there was some sort of switch in x.org that if detects r100 or r200/rs200 r300 etc it switches back to XAA or shadowfb or whatever else that at least allows you to run linux
          Old hardware has it's price. In this case needing to configure some stuff manually. That's what distro forums and wikis are for, to instruct users how to activate ShadowFB if their hardware doesn't work well with modern acceleration architectures.

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          • #45
            Originally posted by Pallidus View Post
            timothy I don't know, I lack the skill set to go deep into xorg and find out what is causing this...

            All I know is that if I use a distro with an old kernel that had XAA as the default acceleration method, everything runs smoothly, glxgears about 300 fps, if I use anything with EXA is unusable about 28 fps glxgears

            agp, kms etc etc seems to be set fine and EXA and XAA thing seem to be the only change




            I am far from being the only one affected by this, I have red the same in lots of forums, spanish/english and portuguese of users complaining when they made the switch from ubuntu hardy heron to ubuntu 9 or 10... all running first generations integrated ati had huge perfomance drops.


            I know the cards are 8 years old and crap, etc etc etc but my specific model the igp 345m was even used in sony vaios of 2004/5...

            I am sorry but ANYTHING post 2002 SHOULD, nay, HAS to run any 3.x kernel distro with openbox or ice or e17 JUST FINE.

            I wish there was some sort of switch in x.org that if detects r100 or r200/rs200 r300 etc it switches back to XAA or shadowfb or whatever else that at least allows you to run linux
            So from the link you posted I take it you were only getting 300fps when using the Catalyst driver which is too old for Ubuntu 12, and you got the same 38 FPS on the open source drivers under Ubuntu 8?

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            • #46
              Originally posted by Pallidus View Post
              I am sorry but ANYTHING post 2002 SHOULD, nay, HAS to run any 3.x kernel distro with openbox or ice or e17 JUST FINE.
              I fully agree!
              I assume you're willing to do the work / finance the work supporting 10+ year old hardware, right?

              [Well deserved] sarcasm aside, you do understand that in the end, in the OSS world, those who are willing to actually commit to doing the work, get to make the decisions, while everyone else can, well, rant in forums.

              - Gilboa
              Last edited by gilboa; 23 August 2012, 07:57 AM.
              oVirt-HV1: Intel S2600C0, 2xE5-2658V2, 128GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX1080 (to-VM), Dell U3219Q, U2415, U2412M.
              oVirt-HV2: Intel S2400GP2, 2xE5-2448L, 120GB, 8x2TB, 4x480GB SSD, GTX730 (to-VM).
              oVirt-HV3: Gigabyte B85M-HD3, E3-1245V3, 32GB, 4x1TB, 2x480GB SSD, GTX980 (to-VM).
              Devel-2: Asus H110M-K, i5-6500, 16GB, 3x1TB + 128GB-SSD, F33.

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              • #47
                timothy no, I never got to install that proprietary driver since it was made for 2.0 (?) kernel. What I did was run live cd's from open suse 11.1 and old ubuntu and others that had XAA as the default and probably some other DRI mesa settings stuff different and I saw that they ran just fine (2.4/2.6)... right now, 3.x kernel even something like arch linux and openbox you open 3 or 4 firefox tabs and it's easier to knife your eyes out.



                and there you go gilboa, you hit the nail right in the head.


                when you are left hanging by the company you actually purchased the product from, you are left at the mercy and whims of people who are doing this as an hobby and could care less if there's some small fishing village in the south border of spain and portugal where the local council uses linux but only has old laptops.


                I understand that in an all encompassing driver like the radeon oss the lowest cards on the list are gonna get sacrificed for the ones in the middle/top, but alas I had to post since the docs all state that these rx2x rx3x etc all run well and they simply do not. It would actually be better to state that upfront than have people install just to be hit in the face by an unusable system.

                the situation here I can tell you it's much different than what happens in america if this site is representative of it.


                no one here buys a macbook air or macbook retina or thunderbolt this or that to run linux. You find linux mostly run in some offices, small businesses , some in public sector, but all people who have moderate or weak hardware (no 2 gigs nvidias 8388x9x)

                Here linux is run by mostly IT students, computer hobbyists, people trying to bring life to old hardware and people who know they can get a decent system with office suite etc etc without having to give their blood to greedy multinational corporations.


                to me this " let's drop unity 2d, let's drop old mesa, let's kill xaa, etc etc" it's sort of alienating the few users you have in this region

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                • #48
                  My sense is that the main disconnect here is that the devs aren't expecting that dropping XAA alone is going to have a big effect, and that other changes between distros are responsible for the performance differences you're seeing.

                  I haven't seen anything here that would change that perception, eg someone changing only from EXA to XAA and back, noting the performance impact, then trying shadowfb as well to see how that works.
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                  • #49
                    Originally posted by bridgman View Post
                    I haven't seen anything here that would change that perception, eg someone changing only from EXA to XAA and back, noting the performance impact, then trying shadowfb as well to see how that works.
                    This.

                    Especially reading Pallidus' latest post, he's introducing waaaay too many variables into the mix, so it's impossible to know what exactly is actually going on. A lot of words written, but very little content, it's all so very vague. Well, it's what you can expect from a rant.

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                    • #50
                      well if anything this can prove to be interesting to people who study linux:

                      The hardware I wanted to install linux was a bunch of HP laptops from 2004. They are all 32 bit south bridge intel PIV's. I picked the one in top condition and stole a ram from another one so it now had 1 gig of ram. (PIV 3ghz, 1g ram, 100gb hdd, Ali sound, Ati agp radeon 345m igp 128megs)

                      I removed all the extra stuff that I deemed unnecessary for the person who this laptop was for ( infrared sensor, firewire, modem etc..) and proceeded to install ubuntu 12.04

                      it immediately defaulted to unity 2d. The system was unusable, opening a few firefox youtube tabs would mean a freeze, the cpu fans (that had just been cleaned) were at max, in short it was torture... XP back on it, chrome was smooth etc etc etc but had the overhead of ESET and the distrust I have of windows since I saw what those ukrainians were able to do so let's try linux yet again...

                      Fedora 17 with lxde: opening more than a tab in firefox was asking for touble, same bad perfomance but you could at least use it yet it was a no go compared to XP...

                      let's try something even weaker: Arch linux with openbox (I can't remember the name of the distro but it was pretty much that, arch openbox and firefox) perfomance was just like slighty better than lxde but still nothing I would give to someone to use or that I consider usable.

                      Bodhi linux: the enlightment proved to be the speedier and most responsive desktop yet the video playback wasn't smooth, firefox scrolling was choppy... again same shit different day.

                      the latest version of that dog pup linux thing made for older hardware: was almost usable but the icons and the system itself just seemed too primitive .


                      then I gave up

                      I couldn't understand this because it simply did not make sense, then I do a search for my graphics card and linux and I see a bunch of people in forums complaining about a huge perfomance drop when they upgraded from ubuntu 8 and then I read about the XAA, EXA thing and that you had to edit xorg conf and make sure the accel= something was XAA or else you could kiss your perfomance goodbye...

                      I didn't want to install linux again and changing EXA to XAA is impossible in a live cd so what I did was run a very old cd that I had burned some years back when I first wanted to see linux and low and behold opensuse 11.1 with kde ran just fine ... same for ubuntu 8, same for any 2007/2008 distro

                      so yep pretty much everything worked well until 'new and improved' acceleration methods were made the default and the first radeons had to be xorg sodomized.


                      by all means kill all the old tech you want, just understand that the decision to simply delete stuff instead of putting it in a nice little radeonlegacyoss or something like that that switches on if it detects rs200 or whatever is gonna keep many people from not being able to use linux .
                      Last edited by Pallidus; 23 August 2012, 01:41 PM.

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