X11 performance problem after upgrading from Centos3 to Centos5 with an ATI Rage XL
- by Marcelo Santos
After upgrading a computer from Centos3 to Centos5 an application that does a lot of scrolling took a very high performance hit. top tells me that X is using a lot of CPU and that was not happening before. The machine has an ATI Rage XL with 8MB and X is using the ati driver as there is no proprietary ATI driver for this board on linux.
The xorg.conf:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "ati"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
EndSubSection
EndSection
Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection
A similar machine that still has Centos3 installed is able to start DRI on the X server while this one is not, this is the Xorg.0.log for the Centos5 machine:
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: Open failed
drmOpenDevice: node name is /dev/dri/card0
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: open result is -1, (No such device or address)
drmOpenDevice: Open failed
[drm] failed to load kernel module "mach64"
(II) ATI(0): [drm] drmOpen failed
(EE) ATI(0): [dri] DRIScreenInit Failed
(II) ATI(0): Largest offscreen areas (with overlaps):
(II) ATI(0): 1024 x 1279 rectangle at 0,768
(II) ATI(0): 768 x 1280 rectangle at 0,768
(II) ATI(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA)
Screen to screen bit blits
Solid filled rectangles
8x8 mono pattern filled rectangles
Indirect CPU to Screen color expansion
Solid Lines
Offscreen Pixmaps
Setting up tile and stipple cache:
32 128x128 slots
10 256x256 slots
(==) ATI(0): Backing store disabled
(==) ATI(0): Silken mouse enabled
(II) ATI(0): Direct rendering disabled
(==) RandR enabled
I also tried using EXA instead of XAA and setting:
Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"
Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
uname -a
Linux sir5.erg.inpe.br 2.6.18-128.7.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Aug 24 08:20:55 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
rpm -qa | grep xorg-x11-server
xorg-x11-server-utils-7.1-4.fc6
xorg-x11-server-sdk-1.1.1-48.52.el5
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.1.1-48.52.el5
xorg-x11-server-Xnest-1.1.1-48.52.el5
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.1.1-48.52.el5
The drmOpenDevice error continues when using the suggested Option "AIGLX" "true".
