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#1 2009-11-05 18:28:50

tjwoosta
Member
Registered: 2008-12-18
Posts: 453

Questions about intel and kms

I use x86_64 with Intel GM965 and I play a lot of games. With this latest xserver and intel drivers update I noticed a great increase in overall performance to where I can now play games like openarena and assault cube with the highest effects settings. Glxgears now gives me about 530 where before it was about 400. That got me thinking that maybe theres something more I can do to enhance my graphics, because I haven't really done any tweaking since installing. One thing Ive been hearing about is KMS, so I decided to check if KMS was enabled in my default kernel.

Here's what I found in the kernel config

[tj@arch ~]$ cat /usr/src/linux-2.6.31-ARCH/.config | grep -i kms
# CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS is not set
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON_KMS=y
[tj@arch ~]$

Im still fairly new at configuring kernels, Ive only done it once before and I had help, but I think this means Intel KMS isn't enabled but Ati KMS is.  So is this config really identical to the config that im currently running?  Is there another way to check if Intel kms is on?  Should Intel KMS even be turned on with the 965, or is there better performance without it? Should I use an Xorg.conf, because right now I'm not but I did try it once and nothing seemed to change performance wise?

I'm basically just looking for some advice on how to increase performance with my chipset from somebody with some GM965 experience.

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#2 2009-11-05 19:28:04

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
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Re: Questions about intel and kms

CONFIG_DRM_I915_KMS controls whether KMS is the default for the i915 module.  You can still enable it with "options i915 modeset=1" in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf.  See http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Int … Setting.29.

To check if KMS is on, cat /proc/fb (it should say inteldrmfb).

I would recommend KMS as with it you get DRI2 and UXA acceleration.  There may be a performance drop right now because of the new technologies, but KMS, UXA, and DRI2 are the way of the future and their performance will soon surpass the old methods.

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#3 2009-11-05 22:00:47

tjwoosta
Member
Registered: 2008-12-18
Posts: 453

Re: Questions about intel and kms

Thank you for your response.

There may be a performance drop right now because of the new technologies, but KMS, UXA, and DRI2 are the way of the future and their performance will soon surpass the old methods.

A performance drop would be a problem for me because I love my gaming, but I took your advise and tried it out anyway.  It turns out theres really not much difference gaming wise.  With KMS I get actual 1280x800 framebuffer compared to 1024x768 that I was getting with vga setting. I also noticed that my overall ram usage has dropped, before it was about 63mb at idle now its at about 50mb.  Another thing I'm noticing is that in games textures are loading up faster, loading up maps takes about 2/3 the time. Other then that performance is about the same. I get about the same framerates as before. So overall I would say its a performance increase.

Is there anything else I could do to try and boost performance?  Would I get better performance with the xorg and drivers from aur?

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#4 2009-11-06 01:22:42

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
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Re: Questions about intel and kms

You're welcome, I'm glad that it worked so well.  Haven't tried all of these, but:

- Try mesa with Gallium3D (--enable-gallium-intel).  Supposedly buggy right now.
- Try git mesa (mesa-git, libgl-git, and intel-dri-git in aur).  I'm running this right now with nouveau, and was for a while with intel.  The latest performance boosts end up here first.
- Try git video driver (xf86-video-intel-git in aur).

A xorg-server-git is a pain to build, as it requires git versions of every protocol, extension library, and input/output driver that you run.  And I don't think you'd get too much of a boost right now, as arch's is pretty recent.

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#5 2009-11-09 11:25:38

shining
Pacman Developer
Registered: 2006-05-10
Posts: 2,043

Re: Questions about intel and kms

tavianator wrote:

- Try git mesa (mesa-git, libgl-git, and intel-dri-git in aur).  I'm running this right now with nouveau, and was for a while with intel.  The latest performance boosts end up here first.

Wouldn't it be better to convert the big mesa official split package to -git ?
That's what I did for nouveau at least. But I could have kept all other drivers.

It seems ugly to have three different pkgbuilds fetching the same source. Each of them is cloning the mesa git repo another time, right ?


pacman roulette : pacman -S $(pacman -Slq | LANG=C sort -R | head -n $((RANDOM % 10)))

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#6 2009-11-09 12:07:27

eldragon
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From: Buenos Aires
Registered: 2008-11-18
Posts: 1,029

Re: Questions about intel and kms

dont try gallium, it was enabled for a split second in the testing repo...there was no report of a working system with it.

about 530ish is what i get from my gma945 too. so this is another reason not to trust glxgears as a benchmark wink yet, full screen games arent as smooth.

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#7 2009-11-09 23:04:45

tjwoosta
Member
Registered: 2008-12-18
Posts: 453

Re: Questions about intel and kms

eldragon wrote:

dont try gallium, it was enabled for a split second in the testing repo...there was no report of a working system with it.

about 530ish is what i get from my gma945 too. so this is another reason not to trust glxgears as a benchmark wink yet, full screen games arent as smooth.

Glxgears does a great for what it is, but it only measures one aspect of performance. True benchmarking utilities like the phoronix test suite run the glxgears test as well as like 4 or 5 other performance tests if you use the x testing suite. If you run the gaming test suite it tests the frame rates of various open source games. You can get a pretty good basic reference for performance just from gaming framerates and using glxgears, it just wont be a full diagnostics on performance.

Luckily my 965 has been treating me pretty good with just default everything, to where I can play nexuiz pretty smoothly with about 30 - 40 fps on medium settings and other games like openarena, world of padman, and warsow at highest settings with similar framerates. The switch to using kms didn't really effect the framerates much but I think it did make it so the textures load up faster for some reason. Im probably going to try out the git packages like described above in a couple days, pending on the outcome of this thread.

I'm really hoping that with some of upcoming releases I might be able to play nexuiz with highest settings and shaders. Then again I have no idea what this card should be capable of because I don't use windows.

Last edited by tjwoosta (2009-11-09 23:14:23)

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#8 2009-11-11 15:46:36

jceasless
Member
Registered: 2009-04-20
Posts: 73

Re: Questions about intel and kms

I have quick question of my own:

Is 915resolution still necessary with inteldrmfb for non-standard resolutions such as those found on many netbooks?

Or can I simply reverse the process that got me uvesafb at 1024x600, add i915.modeset=1 to grub, and expect to see the correct resolution?

Last edited by jceasless (2009-11-11 16:05:11)

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#9 2009-11-11 16:31:10

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
Website

Re: Questions about intel and kms

jceasless: Yes, 915resolution shouldn't be needed.

RE: nouveau-dri-git: yeah, I use a split mesa-git PKGBUILD myself.  To bad the AUR doesn't support split packages.  This is the one I wrote.  It's also linked in the comments of nouveau-dri-git in the AUR.

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#10 2009-11-16 17:36:40

SanzFC
Member
Registered: 2009-11-16
Posts: 3

Re: Questions about intel and kms

I'm trying to get KMS in my Arch x86_64 / Kernel 2.6.31 / xf86-video-intel 2.9.1 driver / Intel GMA X3100 (GM965) graphics card.

In dmesg output occurs this error:

[drm: i915_driver_load] *ERROR* Failed to map registers

Someone knows what means this error?

I think that solving this problem I can load the KMS normally!!!

PS: I'm a brazilian user, so excuse my bad english. smile

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#11 2009-11-16 19:30:29

tavianator
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From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
Registered: 2007-08-21
Posts: 858
Website

Re: Questions about intel and kms

SanzFC:  It's better to make a new topic than to add your post to the end of three existing ones.  Anyway, that seems like a bug in the i915 module.  Try a newer kernel (kernel26-git in AUR, for example) and if the problem is still there, report an upstream bug.

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