Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 18176
NeoMagic256 extremely slow
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:28:55 EDT
After previous versions of Red Hat and Mandrake running mostly flawlessly, I am having some trouble with RH 7.0's XFree86. I have a Sony Vaio Notebook with a NeoMagic 256 chipset. It is incredibly slow. When moving windows around, it feels like a 386. The machine is a P-II 366 with 192MB of ram, and as I stated before ran quite nicely with earlier versions. -Randy
If you switch to the XFree86-3 server (Xconfigurator --preferxf3), does it improve?
Only the 16 bpp mode is accelerated (at least, that used to be the case). Do you run 8 or 24/32 bpp?
8bit is faster, but 16bit used to be even faster than 8bit is now. "Xconfigurator --preferxf3" Does not work.: Config Error: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XF86Config:203 Section "Device" ^^^^^^^^ Monitor section keyword expected Fatal server error: Child error writing to pipe (Broken pipe)
Sorry... the previous output was from 'startx' after choosing the skip the test in Xconfigurator. Choosing to test from Xconfiguration yields an error, but does not say what it is. -Randy
I have the same problem as Randy. Same setup: Sony Vaio Z505SX, 128 MB RAM, and the NeoMagic 256 AV chipset in it. I've tried the same solutions, and got exactly the same results. Xconfigurator sends an error just saying that either you have to modify the settings for the X config or exit. I installed the XFree86_SVGA server that comes with 7.0 to test with it, however it didn't work. I had a similar problem with a desktop computer, same release of the Red Hat Linux, and the only workaround I found was to create the file with Xconfigurator that shipped with Red Hat Linux 6.2, and use that file with the new server... I'm pretty sure if I reinstall the old version, get the file created by it, and reinstall the new one, it will work, as it happened with the desktop computer. (running the 3.3.6 of XFree86) You can see the difference between the two by running /usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/greynetic screensaver. On the 3.3.6 is really fast, using the 256AV chipset. On the 4.0.1-1 version is really slow. It is just as slow as the mentioned desktop computer (which is an old 166 MHz MMX Pentium with 128 MB of RAM and a PCI Trident GUI 9680 card). Any ideas on this one? Thanks. Carlos.
*** Bug 24073 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Please upgrade to Red Hat Linux 7.2, and try the latest XFree86 release. Try configuring with Xconfigurator --preferxf4. If the problem persists, try using: Option "NoAccel" in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 If that solves the problem, we can pinpoint the exact primitive, by removing the above NoAccel option, and instead trying the various XAANo******** directives. All of these options are documented on the XF86Config man page if you need details on how to do this. If you can then provide an update to the bug report indicating which disabled primitive(s) fix the problem, we can try to debug this further. Thanks.
Please reopen bug after attaching the previously requested information if this problem persists. Before doing so, make sure you are running the latest Red Hat Linux updates from our ftp site or via up2date.