Xorg 7.0-rc1 and EXA (radeon 9200)

[Daniel Kasak]

I'm having issues similar to those discussed here.

My system:

Apple Powerbook, 1Ghz
ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 (M9) Lf (AGP)
Gentoo Linux

I've got RC1, from a Gentoo ebuild. I've got DRI and EXA enabled. I'm 
using Enlightenment-0.17. In my script that start enlightenment, I've 
got the line:
xcompmgr -Ff &

After reading Rasterman's receommendation to force cairo to use xrender 
( I've got gtk-2.8.6 and cairo-1.0.2 ), I tried to find out how to do 
this. I couldn't find out, so instead, I made sure I didn't open *any* 
gtk+ or qt apps. I have *only* done the testing below with apps that use 
the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries - ie they use evas to render, 
which is currently using software rendering. Examples of apps I've used:

- evidence, in icon mode ( icon mode is rendered by evas )
- Eterm
- emblem ( enlightenment background selector )
- entangle ( enlightenment menu editor )

The point is that there's no gtk+ stuff.

At this point, I run transset on a number of windows, drag them around 
the screen, change desktops, and do 'stuff', and the performance is 
nothing short of amazing :) If I run an Eterm with 'top', X maxes out at 
10% CPU usage for most dragging operations ( of transparent windows ), 
and the highest is about 40% with lots of transparent windows. 
Everything is 100% fluid.

Unfortunately, things go downhill from there. Opening new windows 
*seems* to trigger the degradation, but it doesn't happen right away. 
Still, sooner or later, I'll go to open something, and it will take 30 
seconds to completely start up - because X is at 90% CPU usage.If I 
continue, X might calm down a little, but half-decent performance is 
broken up by long periods of almost complete lockups. Even changing 
desktops seems to bring about performance degradation.

If I kill xcompmgr, everything is lightning fast again. When I restart 
xcompmgr, I start out with somewhere between decent and original 
performance, but get worse again a lot faster. The best solution seems 
to be to close the window manager completely, and log in again - this 
gives the most time at full performance.

I've done the above tests a number of times. That's about the extent of 
what I can do ... test and report. Sorry. I'm happy to try out whatever 
people want to suggest, patches, etc.

But anyway, I have to congratulate the people who have worked on EXA so 
far. The performance increase over XAA is incredible. Obviously it's not 
stable yet, but it's going to be great :)

Dan


-- 
BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS
------------------------------------------------------If you are not the CanIt administrator and you think this
message is spam, please give the id 18319 and magic value
1808d985ced3 to postmaster at entropy.homelinux.org to be marked as spam.

Teach CanIt if this mail (ID 18319) is spam:
Spam:        http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=s&i=18319&m=1808d985ced3
Not spam:    http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=n&i=18319&m=1808d985ced3
Forget vote: http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=f&i=18319&m=1808d985ced3
------------------------------------------------------
END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS