Bug 557420 - KMS:RV350:9600:AGP poor 2d performance (e.g. firefox)
Summary: KMS:RV350:9600:AGP poor 2d performance (e.g. firefox)
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: xorg-x11-drv-ati
Version: 15
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
low
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jérôme Glisse
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2010-01-21 12:18 UTC by Kieran Clancy
Modified: 2012-08-07 20:13 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2012-08-07 20:13:38 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
Xorg with KMS enabled (slow) (459.34 KB, text/plain)
2010-01-21 12:18 UTC, Kieran Clancy
no flags Details
Xorg with KMS disabled (fast) (114.99 KB, text/plain)
2010-01-21 12:19 UTC, Kieran Clancy
no flags Details
dmesg for KMS (55.35 KB, text/plain)
2010-01-22 16:06 UTC, Kieran Clancy
no flags Details

Description Kieran Clancy 2010-01-21 12:18:25 UTC
Created attachment 385910 [details]
Xorg with KMS enabled (slow)

Description of problem:
When KMS is enabled, I find the 2d performance to be very poor on my hardware. If I put nomodeset on the boot line, things like firefox become noticeably more responsive. For example, minimising and then restoring a firefox window takes about 1-2 seconds with KMS, and about 0.1 seconds without KMS. Other things such as video playback (flash or mplayer) are jerky with KMS and smooth without KMS.

As an example, without KMS I can play a 1280x688 H.264 video at about 30% CPU utilisation. With KMS on the same video will use about 80% CPU utilisation.

This is my graphics card:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV350 AR [Radeon 9600] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Radeon 9600 XT TVD
	Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 16
	Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
	I/O ports at a000 [size=256]
	Memory at f9000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
	[virtual] Expansion ROM at f8000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
	Capabilities: [58] AGP version 3.0
	Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
	Kernel modules: radeon, radeonfb

I will attach Xorg log files from both with and without KMS.

I apologise if this is a duplicate; I did look, but other bugs didn't seem to be exactly the same so I thought it was better to just file a new one to be safe.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-PAE-2.6.31.9-174.fc12.i686
xorg-x11-drv-ati-6.13.0-0.20.20091221git4b05c47ac.fc12.i686
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.7.4-3.fc12.i686

Comment 1 Kieran Clancy 2010-01-21 12:19:24 UTC
Created attachment 385911 [details]
Xorg with KMS disabled (fast)

Comment 2 Jérôme Glisse 2010-01-22 10:23:47 UTC
Please also attach full dmesg when running KMS.

Comment 3 Kieran Clancy 2010-01-22 16:06:06 UTC
Created attachment 386181 [details]
dmesg for KMS

To make matters worse, I am now having to put up with KMS and its sluggishness.

When using nomodeset, it seems that some combination of recent firefox and kernel updates means that my system locks up hard after a random amount of time (i.e. 10 seconds or 10 hours) using firefox - yay. No clues are logged to netconsole (don't have access to a second machine with a serial port unfortunately) and SysRq stops responding. I don't see much point in filing a bug report about it though, as it probably can't be debugged. Bisecting kernels and firefox versions and waiting for firefox to crash doesn't sound like a fun way to spend my weekend.

Comment 4 Kieran Clancy 2010-01-25 19:35:04 UTC
Okay, I now have some numbers to back this up:

I ran gtkperf twice, with 100 iterations each; here are the results of the second run for both with and without KMS. (The numbers were not really that different between first and second runs, so not much point in including them.)

gtkperf with KMS:
---
GtkEntry - time:  0.29
GtkComboBox - time:  2.85
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  3.14
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.96
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.74
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.69
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.48
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.62
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  1.50
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  0.82
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  2.30
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  2.09
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  4.25
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.50
---
Total time: 21.24

gtkperf without KMS:
---
GtkEntry - time:  0.24
GtkComboBox - time:  2.68
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.05
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.51
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.33
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.39
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.29
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.38
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  1.30
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  0.54
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  1.69
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  1.29
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  1.61
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.17
---
Total time: 13.49

The most noticeable difference (apart from the 60% increase in time taken) is that drawing operations like text and pixbuf are significantly slower with KMS.

It turns out that this isn't limited to 2d performance either:
glxgears with KMS:
4099 frames in 5.0 seconds = 819.682 FPS
4093 frames in 5.0 seconds = 818.588 FPS
4099 frames in 5.0 seconds = 819.663 FPS
4097 frames in 5.0 seconds = 819.235 FPS
4100 frames in 5.0 seconds = 819.969 FPS

glxgears without KMS:
10434 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2086.686 FPS
10601 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2120.183 FPS
10654 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2130.784 FPS
10236 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2047.197 FPS
10545 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2108.980 FPS

So, KMS induces a 60% reduction in 3d performance as well.

Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help debug this.

Comment 5 Bug Zapper 2010-11-04 00:21:09 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 12 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 12.  It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained.  At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
'version' of '12'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
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Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that 
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bug to the applicable version.  If you are unable to change the version, 
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Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
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The process we are following is described here: 
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Comment 6 Kieran Clancy 2010-11-04 05:43:21 UTC
Performance is actually WORSE in F13 (KMS only):

gtkperf:
GtkEntry - time:  0.39
GtkComboBox - time:  4.20
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  3.75
GtkSpinButton - time:  1.01
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.63
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.68
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.43
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.58
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  1.96
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  1.96
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  3.44
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  3.26
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  2.91
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.47
 --- 
Total time: 25.71

glxgears:
1713 frames in 5.0 seconds = 342.251 FPS
1800 frames in 5.0 seconds = 359.933 FPS
1868 frames in 5.0 seconds = 373.490 FPS
1802 frames in 5.0 seconds = 360.113 FPS
1789 frames in 5.0 seconds = 357.789 FPS

That is, gtk is now 90% slower than it was on F12 without KMS, and 3d is now 480% slower!

What can I do to debug this?

Comment 7 Bug Zapper 2011-06-02 16:48:19 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 13 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 13.  It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained.  At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
'version' of '13'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 13's end of life.

Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that 
we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 13 is end of life.  If you 
would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it 
against a later version of Fedora please change the 'version' of this 
bug to the applicable version.  If you are unable to change the version, 
please add a comment here and someone will do it for you.

Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's 
lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events.  Often a 
more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes 
bugs or makes them obsolete.

The process we are following is described here: 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Comment 8 Kieran Clancy 2011-06-03 15:02:21 UTC
Just upgraded to F15. Performance is even worse. Seriously, this is making important every-day tasks super-slow like trying to browse the web or scroll through spreadsheets.

I have been putting up with this for well over a year now. Please let me know what I can do! Is this problem in the kernel or in Xorg?

GtkEntry - time:  0.25
GtkComboBox - time:  4.76
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  3.86
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.83
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.91
GtkToggleButton - time:  1.10
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.54
GtkRadioButton - time:  1.05
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  1.71
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  2.69
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  4.83
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  4.75
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  3.18
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.73
 --- 
Total time: 31.2

Comment 9 Fedora End Of Life 2012-08-07 20:13:40 UTC
This message is a notice that Fedora 15 is now at end of life. Fedora
has stopped maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 15. It is
Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no
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Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's
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