Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Greg Bur <greg.bur@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-user] Abysmally slow 2D performance using proprietary Nvidia driver on dual Xeon system (EMT64)
Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 07:08:24
Message-Id: 976cb44f0511062300l3a1e9067k198bfe1164e30af3@mail.gmail.com
1 Greetings,
2
3 I have been trying to fix a somewhat puzzling and annoying problem over the
4 last couple of months that has me absolutely stumped. I have been unable to
5 isolate the cause of the problem and it appears to be intermittant at best.
6 The issue rears its ugly head as follows:
7
8 This is on a dual boot workstation with a Supermicro X6DAL-XTG motherboard,
9 dual 3.0GHz Xeon processors and a GeForce 6600GT video card. The system has
10 worked splendidly since I purchased it back in June with one exception:
11 occasionally when rebooting the system to return to Linux from Windows the
12 2D performance in Gnome is terrible. The problem does not appear immediately
13 nor does it happen every time. Initially gdmgreeter appears as it should and
14 I enter my login credentials. The Gnome desktop loads quickly and as I start
15 to work applications load normally. However, after about 10 minutes the
16 system load on one processor sharply increases to 100% when performing a
17 simple task such as clicking on a button in Firefox, launching a new
18 gnome-terminal window or clicking on the "Applications" menu at the top of
19 the screen. The response time between clicking and the menu appearing for
20 instance is anywhere from 2-5 seconds. There does not seem to be any quick
21 fix for this which is what has me puzzled. If I close all of my
22 applications, log out and log back in the problem "resets." Rebooting the
23 system proves ineffective as well. I have tried various driver revisions,
24 currently using 1.0.6629-r4, and several different kernels to no avail. I
25 have tried both enabling and disabling the RenderAccel option in
26 /etc/X11/xorg.conf and that does not appear to make any difference.
27 Adjusting the NvAGP option does nothing nor does enabling the Composite
28 option however the system seems more responsive when the Composite option is
29 enabled. Switching to the "nv" driver resolves the problem and the system
30 remains snappy with no immediate problems. Occasionally I will begin to get
31 artifacts on the display with the nv driver and then the screen goes
32 entirely white but switching to the console using ctrl + alt + F1 usually
33 resolves this problem. I would appreciate any insight anyone could provide
34 as to what I am overlooking. I have walked through the Gentoo Nvidia
35 documentation numerous times and I have consulted the README document
36 included with the nvidia driver. I am completely stumped.
37
38 Currently I am using 2.6.9-gentoo-r9 for a kernel with the
39 1.0.6629-r4version of the nvidia driver. As I said before I have tried
40 several kernel
41 and driver revisions to no avail. As a sidebar, 3D performance seems to be
42 as it should be which puzzles me further. Again, I appreciate any advice
43 anyone may offer.
44
45 Please see the following links for the last xorg.conf I tried as well as my
46 kernel config and make.conf
47
48 http://pizon.org/xorg.conf
49 http://pizon.org/kernel-config
50 http://pizon.org/make.conf

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