XAA In X.Org Has Finally Met Its Executioner

[Gusar]

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.

[bridgman]

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.

[Pallidus]

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

[gilboa]

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

[timothyja]

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

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?72777-looking-for-old-ati-proprietary-drivers-are-they-gone-for-good&p=279678#post279678

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?

[Gusar]

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.

[Pallidus]

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

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?72777-looking-for-old-ati-proprietary-drivers-are-they-gone-for-good&p=279678#post279678

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

[timothyja]

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.

[gilboa]

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

[Gusar]

You are probably not aware that this "Intel has great Linux support" is only valid for the current generations of hardware, Sandy Bridge and newer. If you're stuck with an i945 or older you'd wish you had an ATI/AMD card. And that i945 is newer then the ATI r200, from about the r300 era and was still sold together with Atom cpus up until ~2 years ago. And I can tell you from my own experience that running a modern Linux distribution (anything with KMS) on a computer with i945 graphics is horrible, beside the abysmal performance there were also a lot of graphical corruptions.

My netbook has i945 and things work great. Of course you can't expect much 3d performance, but the issue is the weak hardware, not the driver. What 3d is there, works fine. And SNA for 2d works great too. Perhaps you're thinking i8xx?

My oldest laptop is 10 years old and has SiS650 graphics. It never had 3d support in Linux, and for some time now activating EXA makes X segfault at start-up (there's a bug open on freedesktop bugzilla, but the SiS driver is unmaintained, so I doubt anything will happen). So what did I do? The logical thing, activated ShadowFB. And voila, stable machine, good enough for web browsing and watching videos (thanks to the hardware overlay that's available with Xv).