Arch Linux

syms

Member

Registered: 2008-12-25

Posts: 296

DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

Hi,
I've updated my system, so i got newest kernel (2.6.31) and newest radeon driver. anyway when i restarted pc, i saw that kms is being used, so i see boot text in 1280x1024, just like in my desktop. But my kwin effects (or compiz) in kdemod doesnt work anymore. So i enabled testing repository, did pacman -Syu and it updated xorg to 1.7 version. I rebooted pc, and effects are working now. Also i see that dri2 is working fine too. But the problem is that my effects are slower. i cant say that they are very slow, but the slowdown is significant. is dri2 supposed to be slower? or maybe xserver 1.7 makes everything slower? now i disabled testing repository, downgraded back to xserver 1.6, and disabled kms, so now everything works as before update. But i cant stop worrying, since xserver 1.7 will hit extra, i will have laggy desktop effects . Also, i tried to use xserver 1.7 with no kms, but xserver crashed every time when i did some bigger animation, also i saw glitches around screen. To me xserver 1.7 seems to be biggest fail in all xserver series. I have a quite old video card, ati radeon 9600 256mb vram, its r300 series, but this doesnt mean that i have to no longer use effects.

ChemBro

Member

Registered: 2008-10-22

Posts: 704

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

You might need the newer mesa-package (7.6) or disable kms (it's experimental at the moment).

syms

Member

Registered: 2008-12-25

Posts: 296

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

You might need the newer mesa-package (7.6) or disable kms (it's experimental at the moment).

I've already had installed mesa 7.6. As i said everything is normal now since i downgraded these packages and kms is already disabled. im just worrying of the future. But its good to hear that kms (and probably dri2 with it) is still expermental, and theres a little hope that it will get better in future.

syms

Member

Registered: 2008-12-25

Posts: 296

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

Ok, so ive tried that with compiz and gnome instead of kde4 with kwin. With compiz everything works fine, dri2 is fine, the only lag i saw is when you run glxgears and use desktop cube it starts to lag. But anyway i still cant find why its not working fine in kde 4.3. I see glitches when i run kickoff menu or when i click on clock or somewhere else. In other words, plasma became glitchy with this. Also kde 4.3 just feels slower with 1.7, i dont know why i dont see performance regresions in gnome with compiz.

eric

Member

From: under heaven

Registered: 2004-02-11

Posts: 118

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

I have the same problem after I've upgraded today

With KMS turned off (modeset=0):
- (un)hiding the kde panel (my panel hides when not in use) is slow and the (un)hiding of the panel leaves stripes on the screen.

With KMS turned on or off:
- scrolling in konqueror on large pages is slower than before;
- cpu usage of X is higher than before, even on idle;
- kwin effects are slower (less smooth) than before, only when 2 or more windows are open.

This is with KDE, kwin and radeon (xf86-video-ati).
Konqueror, arora and rekonq have the same scrolling slowdown; firefox is not affected (although I'm not very sure about this, because I don't use firefox very often).

Maybe Qt or some parts of KDE need a recompile?

Last edited by eric (2009-11-02 02:25:02)

AndyRTR

Developer

From: Magdeburg/Germany

Registered: 2005-10-07

Posts: 1,642

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

No. Poor ati performance will be solved with new Kernel 2.6.32. Mesa 7.6/ati-dri is simply slow with any older kernel drm module.

syms

Member

Registered: 2008-12-25

Posts: 296

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

No. Poor ati performance will be solved with new Kernel 2.6.32. Mesa 7.6/ati-dri is simply slow with any older kernel drm module.

Thats great to hear, i heard that 2.6.32 will receive some kms and ati work. But are you 100% sure that i will no longer have lag and i will no longer have glitching in kde4?
Cheers

eric

Member

From: under heaven

Registered: 2004-02-11

Posts: 118

Re: DRI2 with Xserver 1.7 and radeon feels slower

I've been googling for this issue on the internet and found others with the same problem:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour … bug/446425

I've also found a patch that solved the glitches (stripes) of plasma/kwin on my computer :
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/p … u4.diff.gz
This patch creates a directory with *.diff and *.patch files. Those *.diff and *.patch files should be used to patch the source of Mesa-7.6.

I've patched the source and recompiled libgl, mesa and ati-dri.
Maybe someone can make a nice PKGBUILD of this or include these patches in to Arch's version of Mesa.

Last edited by eric (2009-11-02 21:51:03)