Bug 80557
Summary: | (neomagic) X uses more memory than before, laptops unhappy | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | lindahl | ||||||
Component: | XFree86 | Assignee: | Mike A. Harris <mharris> | ||||||
Status: | CLOSED NOTABUG | QA Contact: | David Lawrence <dkl> | ||||||
Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |||||||
Priority: | medium | ||||||||
Version: | 8.0 | ||||||||
Target Milestone: | --- | ||||||||
Target Release: | --- | ||||||||
Hardware: | All | ||||||||
OS: | Linux | ||||||||
Whiteboard: | |||||||||
Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |||||||
Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |||||||
Clone Of: | Environment: | ||||||||
Last Closed: | 2004-06-01 08:48:22 UTC | Type: | --- | ||||||
Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- | ||||||
Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |||||||
Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |||||||
oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |||||||
Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |||||||
Embargoed: | |||||||||
Bug Depends On: | |||||||||
Bug Blocks: | 82781 | ||||||||
Attachments: |
|
Description
lindahl
2002-12-27 21:53:30 UTC
If you need 2Mb of offscreen memory, that is for an overlay surface. That means that you must run in a resolution that is lower that doesn't consume all video memory. If there is no free video memory because it is completely consumed by the 2D framebuffer, pixmap cache, hardware mouse cursors, etc. and there is not 2Mb free, but 2Mb is required, then of course it is not going to work as expected. There should be absolutely no difference between XFree86 4.2.0 in Red Hat Linux 8.0 and 4.2.0 in 7.3 in this regard. What video mode and depth did you use in XFree86 before, and what video mode and depth are you using right now? I was using 1024x768x16 then and now. I'm not sure if I tried it under RH 7.3. I figured out how to reduce the pixmap cache but not how to reduce the font cache. The ogle guys said that they use 512k or 1024k; all XFree86 tells me in the logfile is the starting memory, not how much is left after the pixmap and font caches. font cache has nothing to do with video memory at all, so reducing or even removing font caching altogether will result in zero change in video memory usage. Please attach your /var/log/XFree86.0.log and X config file uncompressed as individual file attachments using the link below. Created attachment 89141 [details]
XFree86-4 as generated by Anaconda
I've added some commented out entries for the config that did let me play DVDs
with ogle.
Created attachment 89142 [details]
XFree86.0.log
The attached config files show that the default configuration does not leave enough video memory available to permit video playback. This is normal expected operation on a system with very small amount of video memory. In this case, the video driver doesn't have a lot of choice, since there isn't very much video memory. It could either limit the max resolution to a lower res, to ensure there is free memory available for video playback and other hardware features, in which case you'd be guaranteed to be able to play video, but you'd be stuck with a hard coded max resolution. The other option, is for the driver to permit the user to configure whichever resolution is desired that the hardware can display, and then to disable features that are incompatible with the chosen resolution. This is what the driver is essentially doing right now, which is probably the most sensible default, as more users are likely to want to be able to use higher resolution than will want to give up high res entirely to guarantee they can always run video playback. The benefit of the current driver operation, is that both types of users can essentially configure the X server to the choice they prefer. The downside, is that the video driver and X server can't guess which of the two possible configurations a given user will prefer by default. If it defaults to low res plus video, users who want working video support by default will perhaps prefer this setup, however users expect high res to be available by default will likely consider it a bug. There's no way to have 2 defaults of course, and having high res working by default is more likely the common case. This type of issue generally isn't a problem in OSs like Windows, as Windows has the ability to dynamically resize the video framebuffer on the fly, and to reallocate framebuffer resources as needed without restarting. This allows a Windows video playback application to switch the framebuffer to a lower resolution and recover memory with which to utilize the video accel engines on a given chipset while viewing video fullscreen. In newer releases of XFree86, it does have the capability to resize the visible framebuffer on-screen, but unfortunately it does not resize the amount of allocated framebuffer memory internally yet. This is a feature which will likely be implemented in a future release of X.Org X11 (the XFree86 replacement we use in our current Fedora Core release), however that is likely a few years off. Ironically, by the time such feature exists in X, it is possible nobody will be using hardware with such limitations anymore. ;o/ Closing issue as 'NOTABUG' for now, as this is a hardware and software limitation rather than a bug. |