LWN.net Logo

LCA: Catching up with X.org

LCA: Catching up with X.org

Posted Jan 25, 2009 23:32 UTC (Sun) by jlokier (subscriber, #52227)
In reply to: LCA: Catching up with X.org by nix
Parent article: LCA: Catching up with X.org

Sounds like a configuration error - using software scrolling (no acceleration) and not using a shadow framebuffer. That results in a lot of reads from video memory to the CPU (not GPU), which is often that sort of very slow.

Try enabling some kind of acceleration at least :-)
If you can't, perhaps you're using the "vesa" driver, in which case try enabling the shadow framebuffer.

This isn't new to Xorg 1.5, but maybe it configures itself differently and gets this wrong.


(Log in to post comments)

LCA: Catching up with X.org

Posted Jan 29, 2009 11:52 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

It's slow both with XAA and EXA, both of which should surely be accelerating. xterms forced to use core fonts scroll *fast*. Everything else is as fast as usual as well.

I wonder if render acceleration has been broken in recent versions of the ATI driver and/or x11-xserver 1.5... it's something that was only ever implemented for r200 cards anyway, so it could have been broken without most people noticing.

LCA: Catching up with X.org

Posted Feb 5, 2009 0:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Fixed! The X-server-to-be, 1.6, is blindingly fast at client-side font
scrolling: client-side fonts, even antialiased ones, are very nearly as
fast as core fonts in 1.5. The glyph cache in 1.6 is excellent.

Copyright © 2012, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds