[G33] performance drop (20-40fps) in games and compiz after upgrade to Jaunty

[Péter Károly Juhász]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-video-intel

I have a fall-back in performance, compiz, games (xmoto runs around 20-40fps, and under 10fps in the menu), ... When I try to watch some movies my whole X crashes and I got back to gdm.

stone@skynet:~$ glxinfo | grep render
Failed to initialize GEM. Falling back to classic.
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) G33 20090326 2009Q1 RC2 x86/MMX/SSE2

If I try to add the Option "AccelMethod" "uxa", I don't even get to gdm.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.6.3-0ubuntu9
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersion: Linux version 2.6.27-7-generic (buildd@palmer) (gcc version 4.3.2 (Ubuntu 4.3.2-1ubuntu11) ) #1 SMP Tue Nov 4 19:33:20 UTC 2008
SourcePackage: xserver-xorg-video-intel
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-7-generic i686

[lspci]
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31/P35/P31 Express DRAM Controller [8086:29c0] (rev 02)
 Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:8276]
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 82G33/G31 Express Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:29c2] (rev 02) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
 Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device [1043:8276]

[Geir Ove Myhr (gomyhr)]

Thank you for reporting this bug. Note that you have mentioned 3 bugs in the report (low performance, X crashes when you use UXA, and X crashes when you watch a movie), and each of these needs a separate bug report. Since the bugs are in different places in the code, they have different solutions and it will soon be very messy if we try to address all of them in one report. We will therefore dedicate this bug report to the performance issue.

Please file the two other bugs separately. For the video playing bug, hopefully apport will detect that there was a crash the next time you log in and offer to file a bug report. This will include all kinds of useful information from the crash. If not, file the bug with ubuntu-bug the first time you log in afterwards, since the log file Xorg.0.log.old then may have useful information about what happened. For the UXA-crash bug you can try the same (but obviously you will have to fix xorg.conf and maybe restart before you can log in again).

Note that performance bugs like this are one of the hardest kinds of bugs to work with since there is no obvious thing going very wrong (like a crash or screen corruption). Right now, the ubuntu developers are focusing on getting rid of as many of the stability bugs as possible before the release of Jaunty, so this bug may not get very much attention before then. Since the next version (Karmic) may use UXA it would be very nice if we could get the UXA problems fixed, and this may improve performance as well.

It would be nice if you could test some other games and report here on how they're doing on your system. Also, please check the performance troubleshooting wiki page (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance) and report here if any of the obvious problems there apply to you (like the /dev/dri/card0 special file).

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Thanks, this is one of the better crafted performance bug reports I've seen so far.

One thing you could try is the 2.6.28-11.40 kernel. That kernel (and only that kernel) includes the MCHBAR patch which has been seen to improve performance for some people. It unfortunately was proven to cause a serious freeze issue on some hardware so had to be reverted in the #41 kernel, but if it solves this performance problem that would be an extremely useful piece of data.

[Albert Damen (albrt)]

Your Xorg.0.log shows you are using an intrepid kernel (Current Operating System: Linux skynet 2.6.27-7-generic).
This kernel does not support GEM, therefore you cannot use UXA.
EXA with a non-gem kernel is slow due to bug http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20797 (Non-GEM allocations incorrectly force TILE_NONE).

Could you please test with the standard jaunty kernel?

[Péter Károly Juhász (stone-midway)]

Oh... I was so stupid... with the Jaunty kernel everything is fine. I haven't payed attention that the update haven't updated my /boot/grub/menu.lst. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for the feedback.

[Albert Damen (albrt)]

No problem Péter, thanks for confirming all is ok now.