X slowdowns in Hardy Beta

[Christopher Monahan]

Upon switching to the Hardy Beta (upgrade from Gutsy) X is noticably slower

Desktop effects are nowhere near as smooth, and scrolling in all Gtk applications (firefox, nautilus and openoffice etc) is jerky and can cause the application to freeze for short amounts of time while it jerks through.

[James Westby (james-w)]

Hi,

What video card and driver do you use?

Thanks,

James

[Christopher Monahan (foreverwatcher)]

Hi, thanks for the quick response

It's an Intel integrated graphics card. But I can't be sure what driver it uses now, since the xorg.conf file only says "Configured Video Device"

I also did a hardwared DB report, but I didn't submit the code since it says on the site that it wasn't submitted properly ¬_¬
In any case the code is:

66bca72c93c9fb13366cbe44684e31d7

I'm going to switch to the old xorg.conf file (while retaining a backup) and see what happens

[Christopher Monahan (foreverwatcher)]

No improvement by switching conf files :(

Here's the old and new xorg.conf files

PS: If it wasn't for the slowdown in the desktop effects I would be tempted to think that this was a gtk thing, since it only effects the scrolling

[James Westby (james-w)]

On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 16:52 +0000, Maze wrote:
> No improvement by switching conf files :(
>
> Here's the old and new xorg.conf files
>
> PS: If it wasn't for the slowdown in the desktop effects I would be
> tempted to think that this was a gtk thing, since it only effects the
> scrolling
>
> ** Attachment added: "Old xorg.conf file"
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/12841889/xorg.conf
>

/var/log/Xorg.0.log should tell you what driver you are on now.

Thanks,

James

[Christopher Monahan (foreverwatcher)]

I've added the entire log for completeness. But I think that these are probably the key lines:

(II) Matched intel from file name intel.ids in autoconfig
(==) Matched intel for the autoconfigured driver
(==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
(II) LoadModule: "intel"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so

[Timo Saarinen (timosa2)]

I have similar problems with HP OmniBook XE3. Ubuntu 7.04 worked fluently but 8.04 beta seems to be very jerky. It doesn't matter whether changing Appereance / Visual Effect settings. Rows from /var/log/Xorg.0.log :

(==) Matched intel for the autoconfigured driver
(==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
(II) LoadModule: "intel"
(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//intel_drv.so
(II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
        compiled for 1.4.0.90, module version = 2.2.1
        Module class: X.Org Video Driver
        ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 2.0

[Timo Saarinen (timosa2)]

(II) intel(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section
        "Default Screen" for depth/fbbpp 24/32
(==) intel(0): Depth 24, (==) framebuffer bpp 32
(==) intel(0): RGB weight 888
(==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor
(II) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) 830M
(--) intel(0): Chipset: "i830"
(--) intel(0): Linear framebuffer at 0xE8000000
(--) intel(0): IO registers at addr 0xE0000000
(II) intel(0): 2 display pipes available.
(==) intel(0): Using EXA for acceleration

[Timo Saarinen (timosa2)]

It seems setting acceleration method to XAA instead of EXA eases jerkiness. Firefox 3 isn't too fast after the change but better than with EXA. Driver and Option lines were added by me:

Section "Device"
        Identifier "Configured Video Device"
        Driver "intel"
        Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
EndSection

[Christopher Monahan (foreverwatcher)]

I had just implemented that workaround and was seeing great improvements, when an update to the intel driver came through.

EXA now seems to be fixed and is working smoothly in the latest build.

So this bug should be 'fixed'?