Re: Debian v9 it's a stretch
On Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 08:12:21AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 07:57:58AM +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> > That's fascinating because I found the opposite -- my circa-2009
> > self-built Intel Core i7 920-based machine surged ahead when I upgraded
> > from jessie to stretch -- really felt like everything was that little
> > bit more alive. I'd had no complaints about jessie performance but
> > suddenly everything was that bit nippier.
>
> Video drivers, most likely. Jessie's X used an "intel" driver for
> Intel graphics chipsets, whereas stretch's X uses a "modeset" driver.
>
> Notoriously in jessie, some of the newer Intel chipsets actually needed
> (or greatly wanted) a backported stretch xserver-xorg-video-intel
> package for proper performance. (Your older machine may or may not be
> one of these.)
>
Did wonder about video drivers -- but the video hardware is nVidia here
and the driver in use was and is the proprietary nVidia driver. Albeit
now the "legacy" one, as the card is old -- the transition to which
briefly gave me the willies when I migrated from jessie to stretch; a
while back I made a thread here about that, all long since sorted out
now.
I famously have never been able to get the nouveau drivers working at
all. A looong time ago, there was a period where the nVidia proprietary
driver was not very stable with my chipset, or at least the combination
of the nVidia driver and Gnome 3 was toxic, and I tried nouveau then
with no success. I tried again a bit later as an experiment to see if I
could get away from proprietary code -- no dice. I gave up at that point
as by then the nVidia driver was both faster and stable. Since then,
touch wood, it has been solid and performant.
I reckon you are right that the improvement I saw is most likely to come
from video driver improvements somehow, but that means an improvement
between the nVidia driver version in Jessie and the legacy video driver
version in stretch.
Anyway whatever it is, that's not going to stop me giving Debian in
general credit for the improvement! Me like!
Mark
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