AMD E2-1800 APU - could I be running it better?

[Havin_it]

Hi,

I've had my new netbook (not sure I can really call it that, might be more sub-notebook territory with a 1366x768 screen) for a while now since my trusty Sammy NC10 died on me, and I'm not too impressed with performance I have to say. It's a HP Pavilion dm1-4400as with AMD E2-1800 APU which from what little I could find out about it, sounded OK for my usage (no games; bit of video; browsing and NetBeans mainly). I went with ~amd64 install (standard x64 ABI, not x32) since I haven't had the opportunity with a "desktop" machine before, and I'm using the radeon driver.

My findings:

* Video plays OK but can still be a bit sluggish on HD stuff
* Audio is temperamental and often goes into loops (certain files seem to trigger this but KDE system sounds are the most common culprit, eg login music)
* UI (KDE) can get very laggy at times, like 5-10 seconds between input action and visual feedback - requires a reboot
* Sometimes won't go to sleep
* Sometimes when display turns off for power-saving, it won't come back (VT switch no help)
* Battery life is *ass*, maybe 4hrs average

All in all, it just seems so much poorer than what I expected from the machine, and a poor successor to the NC10. Windows 8 performance wasn't amazing either, so maybe the machine is just a lemon, but I really am wondering if there might be better system choices I could have made. Catalyst? 32-bit OS? x32?

I'm certainly about ready to try Catalyst if the radeon overhaul in kernel-3.11 doesn't make much difference, but I'd welcome any other suggestions I could try to improve any of the above issues. I've already applied every tweak suggested by powertop, none of which have made much difference (except maybe disabling NMI watchdog, which may have actually caused some instability) so I'm fresh out of ideas.

Thanks in advance...

[Ion Silverbolt]

I had Gentoo on a HP DM1z which uses an e-450. (Just slightly worse than an e-1800). I had no issues with it playing HD flash and 720p videos. It was even capable at playing Minecraft at low settings. No sleep issues either.

That being said, the e-series APU's need to die. Mainly because getting a system with an A6, or even an A8 APU is barely any more money, and the performance difference is A LOT compared to the e-series. I upgraded to a Toshiba s405 for $330 which has an A6 APU. Worlds faster than the e-450.


Anyway, to your problem:

1. Have you tried a different DE? I used Xfce with my e-450.
2. What kind of cflags are you running? Optimization can make a noticeable difference with these slow APU's.Especially when it comes to mplayer and the like.
3. Catalyst is definitely better for your e-1800. I too hope the 3.11 kernel improvements make a big difference with radeon though. I use radeon now with the A6. It's fast enough for me, but Catalyst was definitely better when I was using the e-450.

[Havin_it]

Hi Ion

1. A slimmer DM would of course be an option (I use FluxBox on some older machines and am comfortable enough with that) but it's more than a little sad to think I'd have to sacrifice KDE as it brings some nice stuff to the table, some of which (kioslaves!) I'd really miss.

2. Deep breath now:

[NeddySeagoon]

Havin_it,

Please post your emerge --info and your /proc/cpuinfo
I run an E450 as a media player, mostly because its totally silent. It dates from before the time when SSDs were a reasonable price so it net boots.

A small number of hardware specific USE flags make quite a difference to graphics performance.

Athlon/Hammer/K8 is correct for the kernel. Its good that it appears to make little difference, since the kernel arbitrates between processes and provides nothing (almost) to the furtherance of those processes. You want the kernel code to run as little as possible.
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[Havin_it]

emerge --info:

[dE_logics]

It's an AMD product. It's only Windows 8 compatible.

AMD has to die.

Hint:You should use vaapi hardware acceleration (x11-libs/libva). Only xbmc supports it, but you need the propitiatory drivers for that (which's a requirement for their closed source hardware).
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[NeddySeagoon]

Havin_it,

That looks good. What frequency governer do you use?

Your /proc/cpuinfo shows

[Havin_it]

@Neddy: I'm using ondemand governor. I used to have a plasmoid on the old box that showed the current clock speed, but I've not added it yet - might do that now actually - so not sure how it stacks up as far as what speeds are usually chosen.

Also, Ion above mentioned Flash videos playing OK: not my experience. Maybe it's something else in Firefox dragging things down, but I doubt it. Flash performance is awful and tends to turn the browser into treacle :( I heard previously that amd64 Flash was pretty bad so assumed this was normal.

@dE_logics: Could you elaborate on that somewhat polemical statement? I thought AMD were quite good on Linux generally (though I realise the ATI baggage may differ here). I will look into the VAAPI thing though, thanks for suggesting that (I never know what these things are when choosing USE flags etc...)

[Ion Silverbolt]

My previous experiences with smooth flash playback was with the proprietary driver. Recent driver updates with radeon have made huge improvements though.

1. Do you have the vdpau use flag enabled for adobe-flash?

2. With kernel 3.10 and mesa 9.2, you should have full vdpau support using the radeon driver. So you might consider using mesa 9.2 if you don't mind using unstable and want to stick with the radeon driver.


As for AMD being "incompatible", that's not really a case on the CPU side. The graphics side can be tricky at times. Usually it involves having the right proprietary driver with the right kernel to get working graphics. It's more of a pain than an incompatibility. The best thing going right now is the improved radeon support. Hopefully using catalyst will be a thing of the past some day.

[Ant P.]

[Havin_it]

[dE_logics]

" [VD_FFMPEG] XVMC-accelerated MPEG-2. "

Humm...
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[crshbndct]

Try installing Mesa 9.2 and enabling the vdpau USE flag, and if you are compiling firefox, enable the gstreamer flag for it.

This will give you hardware acceleration for flash and other media. (Select vdpau in the player of your choice, I find smplayer is best.)

Check to see what your GPU speed is running at, and for the DPM stuff to be enabled, you need to pass radeon.dpm=1 to the kernel at boot. There is a good chance that your GPU is running at whatever its lowest speed is, so the DPM stuff should make a difference, but you can test it by manually turning the power level to high and seeing if that speeds things up, if it does then 3.11 is your fix. (It was released like 2 hours ago, so it should be available very shortly) I would suggest playing with the setting manually anyway, (as a way to test the difference in performance) before enabling it permanently in your kernel.

If you need better 3d performance, (which it doesn't sound like you do from your description, but its worth a try) set R600_DEBUG=sb in your environment, it should speed things up a little.

You need to set some other things in your environment to get vdpau working perfectly:

VDPAU_DRIVER=r600
LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=vdpau

[dE_logics]

For flash you may also try Gnash.
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[Havin_it]

[aim nano]

i thought amd64 and ~amd64 clashed:
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ACCEPT_KEYWORDS
"One should not specify the stable keyword (amd64) when adding the testing keyword (~amd64) because ACCEPT_KEYWORDS is an incremental variable."
-just curious

also, are you using the 64bit flash? i was, then downgraded to 32 with nspluginwrapper and my flash performance improved, there was a bug in hw accel for 64 bit (not sure if it's applicable in your situation)
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[Havin_it]

[Ant P.]

[Havin_it]

OK, just upgraded to kernel-3.11 and, well, this is certainly no placebo effect

How do I know: I've had the box turned on for a good 20min, and the APU fan vent area isn't lethally hot to the touch. Battery % is definitely ticking down slower too, if I'm any judge.

Feeling a whole lot happier about this box today -- great job, Radeon team

On the other hand, wifi performance seems to have dropped severely; always something, isn't there?

That was something I missed from my original list of grievances (as it wasn't concerning the APU): the Ralink RT3290 (rt2800_pci) wifi'n'bluetooth combo chip (no driver for the bluetooth part, other than an OEM one that doesn't build against recent kernels). I knew the bluetooth was probably a non-starter and can live with that, but the wifi reception took a bad hit with this kernel - I now can't sit in my favourite chair, so this shit just got real

Ah well, swings and roundabouts...

So, can anyone articulate the relative merits of USE=r600-llvm-compiler? Because the Phoronix articles I've read are clear as mud :S

[Ant P.]

The rt2800 issue sounds a bit worrying; I'm using one of those and they're usually fine...

I don't think I've ever successfully gotten that LLVM thing to compile. You can get similar benefits by putting R600_DEBUG="sb" in an env.d file, but I've no idea if their effects stack or not (though it'd be nice...)

[Havin_it]