Re: Slow Xorg performance on dual Opteron + Radeon, Jessie 64-bit
Hi Chris (ha, maybe I should have posted directly to the DunLUG list!)...
On 02/08/15 18:39, Chris Bannister wrote:
On Sun, Aug 02, 2015 at 05:55:11PM +1200, Chris Edwards wrote:
I've recently installed Debian Jessie 64-bit on my (admittedly rather old)
dual Opteron workstation, and I'm experiencing pretty bad performance in
X11.
[snip]
I'm guessing it's a driver issue.
What is the output of:
apt-cache policy firmware-linux-nonfree
firmware-linux-nonfree:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: 0.43
Version table:
0.43 0
500 http://ftp.nz.debian.org/debian/ jessie/non-free amd64 Packages
Should I set things up for installing the firmware-linux-nonfree
package? I do already see this in the kernel messages:
[ 14.145030] radeon 0000:02:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware
radeon/R420_cp.bin
and /lib/firmware/radeon/R420_cp.bin exists.
You can 'browse' through /var/log/Xorg.0.log or similar, for the Xorg
log.
This shows some errors relating to the Wacom tablet I have configured in
my Xorg.conf but not currently connected. It's using the RADEON driver.
If I move my xorg.conf out of the way and run it with the default
settings, the slowness is much less apparent, although
__memcpy_see2_unaligned still dominates the CPU time according to `perf
top` - the following output was generated while dragging a Notion window
tab over an xosview window, which seems to be about the worst case
scenario, with no xorg.conf:
<<
63.21% libc-2.19.so [.] __memcpy_sse2_unaligned
4.45% [kernel] [k] acpi_pm_read
1.74% [kernel] [k] clear_page_c
1.33% libfb.so [.] fbBltOne
0.73% [kernel] [k] amd64_insert_memory
0.59% radeon_drv.so [.] memcpy@plt
0.30% [kernel] [k] kfree
0.30% libc-2.19.so [.] _int_free
0.28% libc-2.19.so [.] _int_malloc
>>
I did also notice this in the kernel messages:
<<
[ 15.616348] powernow_k8: [Firmware Bug]: No compatible ACPI _PSS
objects found.
[Firmware Bug]: First, make sure Cool'N'Quiet is enabled in the BIOS.
[Firmware Bug]: If that doesn't help, try upgrading your BIOS.
>>
Could this be related? I think my BIOS and CPUs predate Cool'N'Quiet,
and there are no BIOS updates available from the now-nonexistent vendor. :)
Thanks,
Chris
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