Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

nuovodna · 2009-04-23 22:08:32

there is a pkgbuild for kernel 2.6.30rc3??? Can anyone compose it?? I cannot..too newbie!!

karabaja4 · 2009-04-24 12:11:34

I just tried Ubuntu 9.04. 3D graphics works fine with EXA (intel 2.6.3, xorg-server 1.6.0, 2.6.28, intel i915), what the hell, how is that possible? I tried those packages in arch, graphics was crappy.

Last edited by karabaja4 (2009-04-24 12:20:32)

eldragon · 2009-04-24 12:48:28

karabaja4 wrote:

I just tried Ubuntu 9.04. 3D graphics works fine with EXA (intel 2.6.3, xorg-server 1.6.0, 2.6.28, intel i915), what the hell, how is that possible? I tried those packages in arch, graphics was crappy.

you could always check ubuntu's Xorg.0.log to see what options are being used... same goes with its kernel config file and kernel log.

Bogart · 2009-04-24 12:59:13

Dr4go wrote:

Dr4go wrote:
[...]
The combination of v2.6.30-rc3 and v2.7 should _finally_ work awesome.
Just to correct myself... I thought the drm kernel fix would make it into the rc3 of the kernel version 2.6.30, which indeed was a mistake, because it didn't happen. I guess we have to wait until rc4 then (or merging it on our own).

It seems that it still didn't make it into Linus' tree,even if there was a pull request a few days ago. That means it also didn't make it into 2.6.29.2, so we'll have to wait until 2.6.29.3 at least to have it in Arch officially.

gborzi · 2009-04-24 21:58:54

karabaja4 wrote:

I just tried Ubuntu 9.04. 3D graphics works fine with EXA (intel 2.6.3, xorg-server 1.6.0, 2.6.28, intel i915), what the hell, how is that possible? I tried those packages in arch, graphics was crappy.

Today I tried Ubuntu 9.04 from the live CD and I have seen very different results. glxgears went at less than 200 FPS, gtkperf at ~13 sec. then tried assaultcube. It was practically unplayable. Obviously, minimal desktop effects on compiz as is the default on Ubuntu. I forgot to look Xorg log file, but I suppose it's the tiling problem I mentioned earlier.

karabaja4 · 2009-04-25 14:15:47

gborzi wrote:

Today I tried Ubuntu 9.04 from the live CD and I have seen very different results. glxgears went at less than 200 FPS, gtkperf at ~13 sec. then tried assaultcube. It was practically unplayable. Obviously, minimal desktop effects on compiz as is the default on Ubuntu. I forgot to look Xorg log file, but I suppose it's the tiling problem I mentioned earlier.

here's the cause of my problem - switching to older kernel package 2.6.29.1-2 solves the tiling problem which caused the slow 3D: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=69695

samwise · 2009-04-28 03:26:15

gborzi wrote:

Finally I got xf86-video-intel 2.6.3 working with good performance, better than xf86-video-intel-legacy. Without enabling KMS, I only added
Option      "Tiling" "false"
in xorg.conf.
Hope this helps.

This does indeed help! chromium went from like ~2 fps to ~50 fps, etracer from ~2 fps to ~30 fps, and supertuxkart is now back at its old performance level. Looks like I can use xf86-video-intel-newest now instead of xf86-video-intel-legacy, in fact I am getting better performance.

For some reason, however, KDE won't allow me to activate desktop effects:

Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values.
Check your X configuration. You may also consider changing advanced options, especially changing the compositing type.

Anyone else have this?

mutlu_inek · 2009-04-28 05:29:38

samwise wrote:

For some reason, however, KDE won't allow me to activate desktop effects:
Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values.
Check your X configuration. You may also consider changing advanced options, especially changing the compositing type.
Anyone else have this?

Two possibilities I can think of:

a) Desktop effects are temporarily suspended and can thus not be activated in Systemsettings (this is kind of a bug and fixed now, afair). In this case, you need to activate compositing by clicking Alt+Shift+F12.

b) You have chosen desktop effects settings incompatible with your driver. Check the "Advanced" tab in the Desktop Effects settings and choose something along the lines of OpenGL, Texture From Pixmap and Enable Direct Rendering.

mutlu_inek · 2009-04-28 05:46:58

mutlu_inek wrote:

This commit might make KMS more usable for those with GMA945:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/driver … 651ce6afe2
I will try to rebuild the stack from git on the weekend.
Edit: FYI, this commit to the drm-intel branch of the kernel is supposed to speed things up for us quite a bit, too: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g … cbb5de859c

Indeed, these were the main issues. KMS on my 945GM simply works now. See also my posting here: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 01#p544301

dalingrin · 2009-04-28 13:07:16

samwise wrote:

gborzi wrote:
Finally I got xf86-video-intel 2.6.3 working with good performance, better than xf86-video-intel-legacy. Without enabling KMS, I only added
Option      "Tiling" "false"
in xorg.conf.
Hope this helps.
This does indeed help! chromium went from like ~2 fps to ~50 fps, etracer from ~2 fps to ~30 fps, and supertuxkart is now back at its old performance level. Looks like I can use xf86-video-intel-newest now instead of xf86-video-intel-legacy, in fact I am getting better performance.
For some reason, however, KDE won't allow me to activate desktop effects:
Failed to activate desktop effects using the given configuration options. Settings will be reverted to their previous values.
Check your X configuration. You may also consider changing advanced options, especially changing the compositing type.
Anyone else have this?

I have the same problem here with 950GMA. I've tried EXA, UXA, Tiling On/Off, MigrationHeuristic. Nothing will let me enable KWin compositing.

Edit - Got it to work for me. Seemed to be a bug in KWin not X related. I tried turn on compositing with XRender which also didn't work. So, I tried three more times in a row with XRender(Sounds pretty stupid, I know) On the third try it worked. I could then use OpenGL as well.

Last edited by dalingrin (2009-04-28 14:02:43)

sirius · 2009-04-28 15:34:19

gborzi wrote:

Finally I got xf86-video-intel 2.6.3 working with good performance, better than xf86-video-intel-legacy. Without enabling KMS, I only added
Option      "Tiling" "false"
in xorg.conf.
Hope this helps.

Wow! I use intel-xf86-video-newest 2.7.0-3, with xorg 1.6.1 and 2.6.29.1-4, and Tiling really did it. I use uxa and kms, and with the Tiling option I can use desktop effects in KDE 4 again and play e.g. neverball, which didn't work at all (~2 fps?) without the Tiling option. Flash video in Firefox seems to work better too.
I suspect, though, that the Tiling option removes a bit of the point with uxa, but I'll rather have an usable video driver until they have optimized tiling.

alleluia20 · 2009-04-28 16:13:39

The options set for the Device on http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 44#p536944 work not too bad for me, using Xrender for desktop effects.

Dr4go · 2009-04-29 07:25:12

Bogart wrote:

It seems that it still didn't make it into Linus' tree,even if there was a pull request a few days ago. That means it also didn't make it into 2.6.29.2, so we'll have to wait until 2.6.29.3 at least to have it in Arch officially.

Just to let you guys know... Linus today merged it into his tree: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/g … 3e0f9ad7de

I can't wait 'til v2.6.30-rc4 gets released, because then... things will _finally_ getting better a lot in combination with v2.7 of the Intel driver...

EDIT: I will report back then...

Last edited by Dr4go (2009-04-29 07:26:27)

samwise · 2009-04-29 12:27:30

dalingrin wrote:

[
I have the same problem here with 950GMA. I've tried EXA, UXA, Tiling On/Off, MigrationHeuristic. Nothing will let me enable KWin compositing.
Edit - Got it to work for me. Seemed to be a bug in KWin not X related. I tried turn on compositing with XRender which also didn't work. So, I tried three more times in a row with XRender(Sounds pretty stupid, I know) On the third try it worked. I could then use OpenGL as well.

Hmm - I just tried it again and it did work. Does seem to be KWin related then.

Another wierd KDE bug I have noticed is that the KDE spash screen appears off-center when I log in, as though it isn't recognizing the widescreen. This didn't happen with the legacy driver, and that's all I changed, so it appears to be a kernel mode-setting issue.

sirius · 2009-04-29 21:53:07

samwise wrote:

Another wierd KDE bug I have noticed is that the KDE spash screen appears off-center when I log in, as though it isn't recognizing the widescreen. This didn't happen with the legacy driver, and that's all I changed, so it appears to be a kernel mode-setting issue.

It happens to me too, with xf86-video-intel-2.7, but only when KMS is enabled.

Last edited by sirius (2009-04-29 21:53:32)

armadillo · 2009-05-01 21:40:20

Hello, I think I have a different experience than you people with my Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (Acer Aspire One D150).

Without tampering with anything (that is, with a 2.6.29 stock kernel and 2-6-3 intel driver (testing repository disabled) and no xorg.conf) I have very good 3d performance in etracer (30 fps), tremulous (80fps) and neverball, and nice looking compositing effects in xfce.

Like other people here, enabling KMS made things worse for me, dropping etracer to 11fps but then, curiously, setting tiling off made it even worse (3fps). Also, moving/resizing transparent windows is very slow and unresponsive. 2d applications are maybe a bit faster with UXA, but I am not sure, I cannot measure this.

So I went back without KMS, but the problem there is that some 3d applications appear to be using software emulation and not hardware acceleration. For example, Google Earth shows less than one frame per second, and same with TORCS and World of Warcaft. If I run WoW with the -opengl parameter (as it should be run), it looks very weird and broken (it might show half the screen only, blue-red color stripes all over the screen.

What sort of problem is this, where some applications are fast and some are slow? There are no errors in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Maybe an opengl problem? Do you know perhaps which packages should I reinstall/reconfigure to try to make googleearth work? Is there a way to set the amount of memory used by the graphics card, perhaps?

Bogart · 2009-05-01 22:03:29

armadillo wrote:

Hello, I think I have a different experience than you people with my Intel Corporation Mobile 945GME Express Integrated Graphics Controller (Acer Aspire One D150).
Without tampering with anything (that is, with a 2.6.29 stock kernel and 2-6-3 intel driver (testing repository disabled) and no xorg.conf) I have very good 3d performance in etracer (30 fps), tremulous (80fps) and neverball, and nice looking compositing effects in xfce.
Like other people here, enabling KMS made things worse for me, dropping etracer to 11fps but then, curiously, setting tiling off made it even worse (3fps). Also, moving/resizing transparent windows is very slow and unresponsive. 2d applications are maybe a bit faster with UXA, but I am not sure, I cannot measure this.
So I went back without KMS, but the problem there is that some 3d applications appear to be using software emulation and not hardware acceleration. For example, Google Earth shows less than one frame per second, and same with TORCS and World of Warcaft. If I run WoW with the -opengl parameter (as it should be run), it looks very weird and broken (it might show half the screen only, blue-red color stripes all over the screen.
What sort of problem is this, where some applications are fast and some are slow? There are no errors in my /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Maybe an opengl problem? Do you know perhaps which packages should I reinstall/reconfigure to try to make googleearth work? Is there a way to set the amount of memory used by the graphics card, perhaps?

I can't answer for the second part, but about the first part: KMS with intel driver 2.6.3 is known to be slow. The performance is fixed in 2.7 (now in testing). You can download it and install it directly (it has no dependencies) to see how it works for you with KMS.

mutlu_inek · 2009-05-01 22:39:12

Bogart wrote:

I can't answer for the second part, but about the first part: KMS with intel driver 2.6.3 is known to be slow. The performance is fixed in 2.7 (now in testing). You can download it and install it directly (it has no dependencies) to see how it works for you with KMS.

He'd also need the kernel fixes.

jacob_ · 2009-05-02 06:28:07

I've just installed 2.7.99.1.3 from xf86-video-intel-newest from AUR and it's working perfectly, I had some problems with windows redrawing really slowly (using latest 2.7) and this seems to have fixed it. I'm using KMS.

2.8 has dropped about 10% of the code from 2.7 due to a big cleanup including:

Driver now depends on X server 1.6 or later
Eliminate XAA and EXA support (in favor of UXA)
Eliminate DRI1 support
Fixes for running without DRI at all

Bogart · 2009-05-02 10:01:29

mutlu_inek wrote:

Bogart wrote:
I can't answer for the second part, but about the first part: KMS with intel driver 2.6.3 is known to be slow. The performance is fixed in 2.7 (now in testing). You can download it and install it directly (it has no dependencies) to see how it works for you with KMS.
He'd also need the kernel fixes.

No, the kernel bug only concerns 965+ chipsets. On his netbook, driver 2.7 with kernel 2.6.29 should work perfectly.

Damnshock · 2009-05-02 14:14:32

Bogart wrote:

mutlu_inek wrote:
Bogart wrote:
I can't answer for the second part, but about the first part: KMS with intel driver 2.6.3 is known to be slow. The performance is fixed in 2.7 (now in testing). You can download it and install it directly (it has no dependencies) to see how it works for you with KMS.
He'd also need the kernel fixes.
No, the kernel bug only concerns 965+ chipsets. On his netbook, driver 2.7 with kernel 2.6.29 should work perfectly.

It should but maybe it doesn't :S For example: I get random freezes on my system and I have to hard-reboot. Sometimes even with data-loss

Dr4go · 2009-05-02 15:59:34

@ Damnshock: It's a bit offtopic, but I strongly recommend you to check out sysrq... google for it. All you need to do on arch is to add "kernel.sysrq = 1" to /etc/sysctl.conf.

Greetings.

Bogart · 2009-05-02 17:22:24

Damnshock wrote:

Bogart wrote:
mutlu_inek wrote:
He'd also need the kernel fixes.
No, the kernel bug only concerns 965+ chipsets. On his netbook, driver 2.7 with kernel 2.6.29 should work perfectly.
It should but maybe it doesn't :S For example: I get random freezes on my system and I have to hard-reboot. Sometimes even with data-loss

But that must be a different issue from the performance problems that got fixed in 2.7 and from the kernel bug that makes 2.7 don't work with 965+ chipsets if you enable KMS.

Do you get these freezes with KMS? I do get some if I enable KMS, but it's just X that freezes, I can still ssh into the machine and reboot it gracefully (from another computer, I mean). However, I stay with EXA and no KMS for now until things get more stable.

vinvin · 2009-05-04 12:35:55

armadillo: you should try the Option "Tiling" "false" trick in xorg.conf (see earlier in this thread), i was in the same situation, and now the performances are even better than before kms.

_oggy · 2009-05-09 22:35:11

I tried 2.7.0 from testing, clean xorg.conf etc. KWin's performance still sucks (e.g. fading effects are very rugged), and now I can't even run glxgears and etracer anymore, they segfault on me:

[ 1841.719982] glxgears[26154]: segfault at 1300 ip b7a5068d sp bff9aed0 error 4 in libdricore.so[b7973000+1de000]

I tried rebuilding mesa and xf86-video-intel from AUR, but to no avail. Anybody experiencing the same problems?

Arch Linux

#126 2009-04-23 22:08:32

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#127 2009-04-24 12:11:34

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#128 2009-04-24 12:48:28

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#129 2009-04-24 12:59:13

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#130 2009-04-24 21:58:54

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#131 2009-04-25 14:15:47

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#132 2009-04-28 03:26:15

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#133 2009-04-28 05:29:38

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#134 2009-04-28 05:46:58

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#135 2009-04-28 13:07:16

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#136 2009-04-28 15:34:19

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#137 2009-04-28 16:13:39

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#138 2009-04-29 07:25:12

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#139 2009-04-29 12:27:30

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#140 2009-04-29 21:53:07

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#141 2009-05-01 21:40:20

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#142 2009-05-01 22:03:29

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#143 2009-05-01 22:39:12

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#144 2009-05-02 06:28:07

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#145 2009-05-02 10:01:29

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#146 2009-05-02 14:14:32

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#147 2009-05-02 15:59:34

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#148 2009-05-02 17:22:24

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#149 2009-05-04 12:35:55

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

#150 2009-05-09 22:35:11

Re: Intel 945GM, Xorg, Kernel - performance

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