Re: [gentoo-desktop] Video Card Q965 + i810-2.0.0 + TVTime: high CPU usage by X

[Dirk Gassen]

Thanks for your quick reply. Unfortunately, the email
got stuck in a spam filter that's why I reply so late.

--- Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@g.o> wrote:

> On 18:45 Fri 11 Jan     , Dirk Gassen wrote:
> > I currently have a performance problem on a
> > Optiplex 745/755 and the
> > onboard graphics card. We would like to run tvtime
> > as a TV application.
> > Unfortunately, when tvtime starts X consumes >30%
> > CPU, which results in a
> > somewhat sluggish system (responses to user
> > actions are slow, closed
> > captioning looses characters, etc.).
> >
> > This system did already work well on an Optiplex
> > 620GX (X CPU usage <15%).
> >
> > Here's some more info about the systems:
>
> To simplify things, I'm just going to point out what
> I think are the
> important facts.
>
> > Optiplex 620GX (works):
[SNIP]
>
> 945G with the 1.x intel driver
>
> > Optiplex 745 (performance issues):
[SNIP]
>
> 965Q with 2.0 intel driver
>
> > Optiplex 755 (also performance issues):
[SNIP]
>
> Q35 with 2.0 intel driver
>
> You've tested the new hardware with the old driver,
> and it didn't work
> for unrelated reasons

I'm not sure if the reasons were unrelated but with
the old driver I get two bars with noise, one at the
right side of the screen and one at the bottom (looked
somewhat like uninitialized memory?). I wasn't able to
get rid of by changing tvtime configuration options,
so I thought the best way would be to upgrade the
driver to 2.0, which fixed *that* problem.

> Could you test the old
> hardware with the new
> driver, to test whether it's the driver version
> change creating a
> slowdown?

Nope, doesn't seem to be related to the driver change.
>30% X CPU usage with 1.7.4.

> Also, could you try 2.2 instead of 2.0? If
> that doesn't work,
> try 2.1.

Same thing (I was already looking pretty often if
there's a new driver version and jumped on each new
version)

> It's also possible that the driver's just not as
> good on 965 and Q35 as
> on 945.

Would that be a hardware restriction or would that be
fixable in the driver (and what would I need to
do/contribute to fix it?)

> > I suspect there's something wrong with the MTRR
> > setup on the 745/755 (wild
> > guess):
> > localhost ~ # cat /proc/mtrr
> > reg00: base=0x00000000 (   0MB), size=65536MB:
> > write-back, count=1
> > reg01: base=0x3d600000 ( 982MB), size=   2MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> > reg02: base=0x3d800000 ( 984MB), size=   8MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> > reg03: base=0x3e000000 ( 992MB), size=  32MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> > reg04: base=0x3d500000 ( 981MB), size=   1MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> > reg05: base=0x40000000 (1024MB), size=1024MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> > reg06: base=0x80000000 (2048MB), size=2048MB:
> > uncachable, count=1
> >
> > ... and X reports in its log:
> > (WW) intel(0): Failed to set up write-combining
> > range
> > (0xd0000000,0x10000000)
>
> Yeah, this could cause problems with speed. If it
> worked in the old
> versions with otherwise identical software
> configurations (e.g. kernel
> features), this could be a driver bug.

How would I go about setting it up manually? Or does
that need to be fixed in the driver?

Do you think I should contact the driver developers or
file a bug report for the driver?

BTW, to rule out any other interference from other
pieces of software (e.g., OpenBox) I did start only X
and tvtime, still the same problem.

> Thanks,
> Donnie
> --
> gentoo-desktop@l.g.o mailing list
>
>



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