client-side font rendering very very slow in X.org xserver 1.5.3 w/r200: massive fetches from VRAM, why?

[Dan Nicholson]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> wrote:
> On 31 Jan 2009, Michel Dänzer said:
>
>> On Fri, 2009-01-30 at 21:59 +0000, Nix wrote:
>>> On 30 Jan 2009, Michel Dänzer stated:
>>> >Trying current xf86-video-ati Git might be good, but my main suggestion
>>> >would be to try xserver Git server-1.6-branch with EXA.
>>>
>>> OK. Do I need to upgrade Mesa or anything related at the same time?
>>> (I'm currently on libdrm 2.4.1, Mesa a few commits past 7.2.0).
>>
>> I think that should be fine; if anything 3D related breaks though, you
>> can always try upgrading to Mesa 7.3. :)
>
> I dug out from under the pile of crud caused by being the only person in
> the company who made it to work when the staggering total of 10cm of
> snow fell on south-eastern England (10cm! imagine that! enough to drown
> a garden gnome!), and tried it.
>
> I pulled util/macros, proto/randr, proto/input and pixman to git head so
> the X server (1.6-branch head) would build and... it doesn't work as
> well as I might have hoped:
>
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/local/share/fonts, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/share/fonts/override, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/freefont, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/jmk, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/local, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/mathematica, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/mozilla, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/SillyNamesForAdobeFonts, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TeX, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TTF, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/cyrillic, removing from list!
> [dix] Could not init font path element /usr/lib/X11/fonts/OTF, removing from list!
>
> It's hard to check the scrolling behaviour of antialiased and fixed-point text
> when the only font you have is 'fixed' :)
>
> My X.org log is below (just ignore the version mismatches: yes, the kbd
> and mouse drivers didn't load, but I can easily fix that by rebuilding
> them --- but there's not much point if all my fonts go missing, and I
> doubt they went missing because of the missing mouse driver somehow.)
>
> Ideas?

The output isn't quite what I'd expect, but I think this is because
it's using the builtin fonts only. Try rebuilding the server with
--disable-builtin-fonts, or apply this patch that's a candidate for
1.6:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=49b93df8a3002db7196aa3fc1fd8dca1c12a55d6

I suspect that will get your fixed fonts back.

--
Dan