i810 problems and questions

[Jaymz Julian]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 06:09:49PM +0100, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-07-07 at 18:32 +0200, Jan Rychter wrote:
> > I've decided to give the new xorg release (7.1) a try in the hope that
> > the 855GM in my tablet pc will now be fully supported. And, lo and
> > behold, we're almost there!

I have an aparently very similar tablet (or at least the same video chip and
problems...), and was having the same set of issues, and did update to the
latest git.  And...

> > 2. It seems I can't get acceleration when rotating the screen
> >    CW. Windows move around sluggishly, xterms scroll slower, web pages
> >    scroll in a jerky manner. This is how tablet pc users spend 99% of
> >    their time, so it's quite important for me. Is this a hardware
> >    limitation, or are there plans to improve this? I thought hardware is
> >    capable of helping here, as Windows felt quite snappy even when
> >    rotated.
> 
> There's been a few rotation fixes recently, so you might want to get the
> current git repo.

It's still a little slower when scrolling web pages and so on, but then so
is windows - and it's not _monsterously_ slow like it was :).

> > 5. DRI still seems to be a no-no. Tried enabling DRM, messages indicate
> >    acceleration is available, but glxgears only does 400fps, looks
> >    strange (the motion isn't smooth) and the entire machine hangs hard
> >    when I click the "close" button on the glxgears window.
> 
> Get the latest git repo.

This one still doesn't work for me - and DRI rotated returned an error about
a missing/broken vblank IRQ.  I hacked the vblank check out of the driver, and
things did in fact _work_, which was a definatly improvement - and although
glxgears is not, in fact, a benchmark, the speed of it did halve From 780fps
to 423fps).  That said, to be fair, I'm personally getting enough speed out of
it that it's still acceptable to me.

I will point out though that performance improved a heap when I added a 
VideoRam line - otherwise my tablet only defaults to 32meg vram, iirc.

In a similar vein, running compiz with aiglx while rotated will cause a nice
hang (though it's quite fast in normal mode :)) - I have no idea if this is
expected behaviour or not, and I havn't attached a debugger to it yet (I
currently solve it by just disabling compiz when I need to tablet).  On the
other hand, rotating while it is active will cause very, very small windows :).
Suitably odd...

	--j

-- 
--
Jaymz Julian - Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
"Hannibal is a serial killer. He only likes to kill and eat people. 
 Very few people have `I want to be killed and eaten' on their cards, 
 so Hannibal is out of a job." - http://cards.sf.net