Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

[vincenzo16]

Hi all,

I just upgraded my kubuntu 9.10 -> 10.04. Window refresh and scrolling inside them is much slower than before. It's quite annoying and I do not know how to solve it.
This is currently my configuration:

Laptop Asus A2500D
cpu:AMD Athlon XP-M 2800+ (2.1 Ghz)
ram: DDR333 1024Mb
graphics: ATI mobility radeon 9200 (32Mb)

- I use the open source ATI driver as fglrx does not support my card.
- I switched off graphical visual effects.
- I DON'T use nepomuk and strigi, I disabled them.
- The hard disk is not swapping and the highest cpu load with firefox activated is:
10-12% Xorg
10-20% Firefox
- The slowness is clearly visible while scrolling Konsole, where, keeping the Return key pressed, it takes quite a few seconds to scroll 20-30 lines.
- I upgraded from kde 4.4.2 -> 4.4.3 via PPA repository and not much changed.

Do you think that it's my old system fault or there is something wrong with the video drivers?

[deezy]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

Hi!

I've got a similar configuration on one of my laptops and got exactly the same problems.
Unfortunately I haven't found any solution yet. It seems to be related to xorg or the ati driver.
But I think at the moment there's not enough hard evidence to file a bug....

[nenadsuperzmaj]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

I don't use ATI, but nvidia with restricted drivers, but I I have also noticed some slowdowns in Konsole when using Tab auto-complete on aptitude install. I takes pretty long time to offer available apps. So perhaps this is Konsole matter, not strictly connected with scrolling or graphics?

[vincenzo16]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

Here is an update:

The speed of my desktop improves if I switch desktop effects on, probably thanks to hardware acceleration, but then I have a stability problem:

after a variable time of usage (sometime 15 minutes, sometimes 1 hour), the screen becomes black for a few seconds and then a dens grid of vertical and variably colored lines appears on the screen, the mouse pointer becomes blurred and it is freezed after some seconds. The CPU starts going at maximum and no ctrl+alt+canc, ctrl+alt+backspace, ctrl+alt+f1 works. The only available option is hardware switch off!!

I had X stability problem with OpenGL applications in ubuntu 8.04, but I was able to fix them limiting my AGP speed to 4x instead to supported 8x via the "AGPMode" Option in "xorg.conf", but with 10.04 this did not work because:

1) I did not find any xorg.conf in /etc/X11
2) I tried to copy the xorg.conf.failsafe to xorg.conf and modified it to add the "radeon" Driver section and the AGPMode option, but a subsequent look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log showed me that the option was explicitly "ignored". I think this has to do with the more recent version of Xorg and Xserver than the ones in 8.04.

Despite years of development of the radeon driver my video card has been always badly supported I guess , at least concerning stability.

[mia1dolfan]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

My video driver is open source Radeon driver (X-300 Mobility). Out of date, but it hangs in there. I too experienced video slow downs in Ubuntu Lucid until I disabled the frame buffer console, which was enabled on my system in this version of Ubuntu. Temporary disable frame buffer for one session to see if it's the problem by rebooting and passing the option nomodeset to Grub.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FrameBuffer#...%20boot%20menu

[vincenzo16]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

Ok, this is valid also for ubuntu gnome-version, which is not as slow as kubuntu but still has problems related to the radeon open source driver.
I tried, as you suggested, to add the "vga=normal nomodeset" option to the grub boot line.
Well, the IS definitely some effect. The systems boots and running "glxgears" now gives much better results:

before the added boot option: ~1800 fps
AFTER the boot option: ~ 4200 fps

so current 10.04 ubuntu and kubuntu have some graphical setting which significantly depresses open source radeon graphics performance.

Unfortunately, the above specified boot options, produces also some bad consequences:

1) The boot splash is now "flickering", this is not a serious problems but it's ugly
2) The flickering involves also all the virtual consoles, those obtained but pressing ctrl+alt+f1,2,.... and this IS a more serious problem, as these console are almost unusable.
3) I tried an opengl game to test graphics performance. I tried with Warcraft III+wine 1.2rc3
- before boot option: the game starts and works but is almost unplayable because terribly slow
- after boot option: the game does not start!!!!

I think there is enough material to file a bug! The situation with old radeon cards was far from ideal with older (k)ubuntu version, but now it is definitely worse! Is anyone aware of some already present bug reports concerning these problems?

[Rog131]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

Here:

CPU AMD Athlon (Barton) XP 2500+ (1.83 GHz)
GPU AMD (ATI) Radeon 9600 XT.


Kernel

With the standard Lucid (2.6.32) kernel the desktop is sticky and the CPU load (idle) is 10-15 % higher than with the Karmic. A bug report > Bug #524281: Tens of wakes per second in "[kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick" (I only have one core but still this is hitting me).

Workarounds - working at here:

The older Karmic (2.6.31) kernel > Topic: Install older kernel?.
+ almost as good as the Karmic.
- no KMS/DRI2

Running now with the:

uname -a

2.6.35-2-generic #2 Wed Jun 9 23:28:56 EEST 2010 i686 GNU/Linux

from the Maverick.
+ par with the Karmic
+ KMS/DRI2 support


ATI

There was last moment problems > Topic: xorg-server memory leak and there was reverts > [ubuntu/lucid] xserver-xorg-video-ati 1:6.13.0-1ubuntu5 (Accepted):

...
Revert recent performance enhancement work included in 6.13.0, as it appears to regress performance fairly severely in some circumstances such as using googleearth.
...

Ati/Radeon bugs > Bugs in xserver-xorg-video-ati
Pick yours .

I'm now running with the Xorg and the Ati driver from the > xorg-edgers fresh X crack . They seem to work fine but be warned:

Anyone using packages from this archive is expected to read this page first and it is recommended to check back occasionally for notice on problems that may arise...

...they are highly experimental so expect breakage if you use it and please do not report bugs on launchpad...

*IMPORTANT NOTICE* - If you are upgrading from one release to another and are using this PPA, be sure to install ppa-purge and use it to downgrade all of this PPA's packages before the upgrade or you will have a broken system

[larbac]

Re: Scrolling and window refresh very slow after upgrade to 10.04

Ati/Radeon bugs > Bugs in xserver-xorg-video-ati
Pick yours .

I'm now running with the Xorg and the Ati driver from the > xorg-edgers fresh X crack . They seem to work fine but be warned:

Anyone using packages from this archive is expected to read this page first and it is recommended to check back occasionally for notice on problems that may arise...

...they are highly experimental so expect breakage if you use it and please do not report bugs on launchpad...

*IMPORTANT NOTICE* - If you are upgrading from one release to another and are using this PPA, be sure to install ppa-purge and use it to downgrade all of this PPA's packages before the upgrade or you will have a broken system

I have installed these updates, but when I go see the driver installed is still FGLRX ATI/AMD proprietary.
Shouldn't have to appear Xorg-Edgers driver?
How can I enable it?