Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Compositing too slow in KDE

[Mick]

On Tuesday 22 March 2011 16:45:54 Dale wrote:
> Bill Longman wrote:
> > On 03/20/2011 12:09 PM, Mick wrote:
> >> On Sunday 20 March 2011 18:38:00 Mick wrote:
> >>> On Saturday 19 March 2011 23:02:11 Jorge Martínez López wrote:
> >>>> I also have an ATI card and I do suffer the slow compositing. I solved
> >>>> it by switching back to the classic Mesa (instead of Gallium).
> >>>
> >>> Thanks Jorge,
> >>>
> >>> I switched to classic too and now it does not crash - however:
> >>>
> >>> 1. When I start kde compositing is disabled.
> >>>
> >>> 2. If I click on Resume Compositing, then the first time I try it I get
> >>> a notification saying:  "Compositing has been suspended by another
> >>> application" and it remains disabled.
> >>>
> >>> 3. The second time I try to resume compositing it works!
> >>>
> >>> 4. If at that stage I exit/restart KDE compositing is disabled again
> >>> ... o_O
> >>>
> >>> Why is this happening?  What other application is clashing or causing
> >>> compositing not to take?
> >>
> >> BTW, I just tried this on an older Pentium 4 32bit box with an ATI
> >> Radeon X600 (RV380) and it is exhibiting similar symptoms, except that
> >> if I try to resume compositing a second time kwin crashes.
> >
> > I have an AMD Phenom II X4 940 with an Radeon 4870 that loves to crash
> > when I turn on compositing. OpenGL works wonderfully until it crashes
> > kwin. XRender chews up so much CPU I'd rather not have it.
> >
> > I have an AMD Athlon II X4 635 with an onboard Radeon 4200 that loves to
> > crash when I turn on compositing.
> >
> > Both these boxes have SB700/SB800 chipsets. I use xdm on the former and
> > manually run X on the other. Same problem on both.
> >
> > I did not have this problem in xorg-server 1.7 series.
>
> I have a very similar setup and it works fine here, AMD Phenom II X4 955
> Deneb 3.2GHz with a Nvidia GT-220 video card.  I also have the
> SB700/SB800 chipset as well, Gigabyte mobo.  The biggest difference I
> see is the video card as far as hardware is concerned.
>
> Software, I'm on xorg-server-1.9 here.  I never tried the older series
> on this rig.  I also still have a xorg.conf file too.  May not matter
> but just upgraded to a 2.6.38 kernel.  Also, no hal here either which is
> why I went with that xorg version during my install.
>
> I hope this little bit of info helps in some small way.  If you need
> more info about my setup, let me know.

So this seems like the xorg-1.9 driver won't play nicely with ATI video cards.  
FYI mesa classic seems to be better than gallium, although both crash.  As 
already reported xrender works, but eats up resources.

Will have to wait for later versions it seems.

Thanks for your replies.
-- 
Regards,
Mick