Bug#607510: Suggestion about slow radeon, debian bug 607510

[Gábor Melis]

GSR <gsr.bugs at infernal-iceberg.com> writes:

> Hi,
> daenzer at debian.org (2011-02-11 at 1035.03 +0100):
>> On Fre, 2011-02-11 at 05:54 +0100, GSR wrote: 
>> > Could you check MigrationHeuristic setting? And try with "greedy"?
>> This option doesn't have any effect with current upstream xserver and
>> KMS, and even with older xservers where it accidentally had an effect,
>> it's probably better to use the radeon driver option "EXAPixmaps" "off"
>> if you want to prevent acceleration on all pixmaps other than the
>> visible screen.
>> 
>> Might be worth trying the current X server and driver in sid first
>> though to see if they're doing better.
>
> With KMS & 6.13.1-2+squeeze1 (Sid has 6.13.2-2, update scheduled in
> some days) removing MigrationHeuristic from xorg.conf gives acceptable
> speed, same than with it. So at some point in the past, the issue that
> required greedy was solved. The obvious test was >5 sec canvas
> refreshes in GIMP when repositioning the content. Thanks for the tip.
>
> GSR
>  

I have tested smart, greedy, exapixmaps on/off with EXA and 'options
radeon modeset=0'. They don't seem to have any noticable effect with the
exception of smart that made xorg segfault. Apart from that, the old
konsole font still makes konsole crawl and there are noise-like
artifacts on the icons in the taskbar and on window borders.

Another data point is what my other, almost identical t60, does. With
kms it starts to flicker randomly as if vert sync were off. Sometimes it
rights itself for no apparent reason. It's unusable. Without kms there
is no flicker after a day of testing. The konsole font issue is still
there though.

Note that the two machines have almost identical hardware: the first has
a slightly faster cpu and 3945ABG wireless, the second has a slower cpu
and AR5212 wireless. Furthermore, both have the same packages installed
(by now they both run squeeze) and the same xorg.conf. The module list
has very few differences and those are due to the different wireless
cards. BIOS settings are identical, too. BIOS versions are not quite the
same (2.20 and 2.26), but both are pretty recent (the second behaved the
same with 2.17 that's older than 2.20). Xorg logs are pretty much the
same.

For the flickering, Option "DisplayPriority" "HIGH" didn't help either.

Gabor