*SOLVED* - 2D draw very slow, intel / fglrx Xorg driver

csmart · 2009-01-11 00:52:57

Hey all,

My very first support post to the forums

I have an issue on a few computers whereby the 2D drawing in X is very slow. This happens on my laptop with Intel vga and also on a desktop when using the proprietary fglrx driver. I did not have this problem a few months ago when using stable. At that time, I installed testing and discovered the problem, so I went back to stable. Some time later an update to Xorg came into stable and since then the problem is now in the that tree also.

I thought it might be the new GEM stuff for the Intel driver, so I installed the 2.6.28 kernel when it was released - it did not solve the problem. Installing an NVIDIA card into the desktop box does solves the problem (can't do that for my laptop!). Because it's happening with the intel and fglrx drivers, but not with NVIDIA, I think it might be a problem with some Xorg component that the NVIDIA driver performs itself? But I've no idea..

Essentially, I'm using wmii as my desktop, which is a tiled window manager. Creating a new terminal window, switching between them and closing them all is very slow (taking a second or more), when it should be pretty much instantaneous.

When doing these things, Xorg takes up 90% CPU usage. By comparison, on the same laptop under Debian it only uses 10% CPU (and the problem does not exist).

I have created two desktop screencasts of what I mean. In the videos I am quickly opening a bunch of xterms and then later holding down 'switch between terminals', then holding down 'close terminal'. I run htop to show the CPU usage.
Arch, 4.9 MB, OGV - http://christophersmart.com/videos/archlinux-wmii.ogv
Debian, 5.7 MB, OGV- http://christophersmart.com/videos/debian-wmii.ogv

Any ideas?

Thanks a bunch!
Chris

Edit: FYI, the desktop has an Intel Core2 CPU with 8GB RAM and 2 x WD Raptor drives in RAID 0. With an ATI card, wmii is unusable.

Last edited by csmart (2009-01-17 00:19:57)

hpestilence · 2009-01-11 01:29:23

I thought this was coming from the catalyst 8.12 driver?

csmart · 2009-01-11 01:44:51

Well I first discovered the problem with the 'intel' driver and later when I set up Arch Linux on a desktop I was met with the same issue. I think it might be some part of Xorg that they both share, but it's not just a problem with the catalyst driver.. unfortunately

Dheart · 2009-01-11 09:05:22

In order to get useful performance with intel card, see this thread.

csmart · 2009-01-15 04:34:05

Thanks Dheart, I'm in the process of trying this now..

-c

csmart · 2009-01-17 00:19:41

Letting you know that the problem is solved (at least on my Intel-based laptop) by re-building Xorg drivers, etc.
Haven't tried on the FGLRX system, but assume the new Xorg and kernel combo will solve it too.

Thanks for the link!

-c

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-11 00:52:57