very bad, and very weird, scrolling text performance xorg 1.5.3 intel 2.5.1 GM965

[Johannes Truschnigg]

On Monday 15 December 2008, Jeffrey Baker wrote:
> I seriously doubt it, since performance was far better last week, last
> month, and a year ago with the same hardware.  I think we can safely
> pin this current problem on the software.
>
> Even if it were limited at 50kglyphs/s, the 7m character output would
> still come out in 140s, not 400s.
>
> -jwb

I must say I'm also very unhappy with the intel driver's degrading 
performance. I don't have any hard numbers, but the "snappiness" of esp. 
scrolling text has gone nothing but downward over the last months.

It's nice to see/read developers experimenting with new acceleration 
architectures and all, but if there is no net gain over XAA, what is it worth 
anyway? I certainly would not mine one of my host CPU's four cores at 50% 
load if my everdays' desktop tasks performance would be better than what it 
is.

I don't really want to believe it's the hardware that's too slow for what X is 
doing; last I checked, Windows GDI performance was top notch with Intel 
hardware.

I really love how Intel and its fine development team supports a free software 
stack even on the desktop side of things, and how these efforts benefit even 
users of hardware from different manufacturers. Yet on the other hand, I'd 
really appreciate more accurate/up-to-date docs about the good stuff that's 
in the making. It sucks to iterate over some half a dozen developer's blogs 
every second month or so just to grok why EXA is so much slower than XAA if 
$option is (not) set. There should be some kind of "tweaking guide" on 
intellinuxgraphics.org imho or at least some other definite resource with 
infos about what's recommended, and what's not. I'm tired of fiddling with my 
xorg.conf anew for every minor release that gets pushed out, just to have my 
system revert to 70-90% of the last driver revision's performance level.

Sorry for ranting, esp. at this length... I hope you don't take it the wrong 
way. I really appreciate all your work, I just wish it would be more visible 
for us, the "end users".

(I've got an GMA X3100 in my desktop, and it's seemingly growing ever slower 
for months now, as well as a GMA X4500HD in my ThinkPad x200 which hardlocks 
the system when resuming from disk with the "intel"-module loaded, so please 
bear with me. Btw, don't you think a fix of the latter problem, which I do 
think exists, would warrant for a minor bugfix release? Please? 
Pretty-please? :))

-- 
with best regards:
- Johannes Truschnigg ( johannes.truschnigg at gmx.at )

www: http://johannes.truschnigg.info/
phone: +43 650 2 133337
jabber: johannes.truschnigg at gmail.com

Please do not bother me with HTML-eMail or attachments. Thank you.
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