questions about graphic cards

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kkspeed · Post by **kkspeed** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 11:27 am

Recently I installed gentoo. Everything goes well except for video cards.

I am running a Acer 4745G which has a Radeon Mobility HD5650 and an embedded Intel GMA card inside the i3-330m CPU.
The annoying thing is that they seem to run tooooooooo slow...

I followed the following links and did the things step by step:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Intel_GMA
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/dri-howto.xml
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ati-faq.xml
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Radeon

But now, when I open up some applications in a terminal simulator (no matter what it is, gnome-terminal, urxvt, terminal in XFCE, roxterm or so)
, i.e Vim, and try to scroll the screen, it scrolls so slow and you can even
see the text "drawing" on the screen, which is extremely annoying. What's worse is that it uses too much CPU resources. In "top"
I can see that while scrolling the screen line by line with "j" in vim, the CPU usage reaches up to 70%!

But in the real terminal, that is when you press ctrl+alt+f1, and run vim, it scrolls extremely fast!

When I type glxinfo, it shows direct rendering is on and OpenGL is ready:
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) Ironlake Mobile x86/MMX/SSE2
(But I see quite a lot of "None" and "Slow" in the following contents)

I installed:
xf86-video-intel 2.14.0
mesa 7.10.2
libdrm 2.4.24
xorg-server 1.9.4

I have in the xorg.conf file the following related things:

Code: Select all

Section "Module"
	Load  "dri2"
	Load  "record"
	Load  "extmod"
	Load  "dri"
	Load  "dbe"
	Load  "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
	Option     "AccelMethod"     "EXA" 	# [<str>]

        Option     "XvMC" 			"true" 	# [<bool>]
        Option     "XvPreferOverlay" "true"   	# [<bool>]

        Option     "HotPlug"         "true"   	# [<bool>]
	Identifier  "Card1"
	Driver      "intel"
	BusID       "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

Section "dri"
	Mode 0666
EndSection

Section "Extensions"
	Option "Composite" "Enable"
EndSection

There is not any (EE) or (WW) messages related to graphics in my Xorg.0.log.

My emerge --info looks like:

Code: Select all

Portage 2.1.9.42 (default/linux/x86/10.0/desktop/gnome, gcc-4.4.5, glibc-2.11.3-r0, 2.6.38-gentoo-r1 i686)
=================================================================
System uname: Linux-2.6.38-gentoo-r1-i686-Intel-R-_Core-TM-_i3_CPU_M_330_@_2.13GHz-with-gentoo-2.0.2
Timestamp of tree: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:30:01 +0000
app-shells/bash:     4.1_p9
dev-lang/python:     2.6.6-r2, 3.1.3-r1
dev-util/cmake:      2.8.1-r2
sys-apps/baselayout: 2.0.2
sys-apps/openrc:     0.8.0
sys-apps/sandbox:    2.4
sys-devel/autoconf:  2.13, 2.65-r1
sys-devel/automake:  1.9.6-r3, 1.10.3, 1.11.1
sys-devel/binutils:  2.20.1-r1
sys-devel/gcc:       4.4.5
sys-devel/gcc-config: 1.4.1
sys-devel/libtool:   2.2.10
sys-devel/make:      3.81-r2
virtual/os-headers:  2.6.36.1 (sys-kernel/linux-headers)
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="x86 ~x86"
ACCEPT_LICENSE="*"
CBUILD="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -pipe"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc"
CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/ca-certificates.conf /etc/env.d /etc/fonts/fonts.conf /etc/gconf /etc/gentoo-release /etc/revdep-rebuild /etc/sandbox.d /etc/terminfo /etc/texmf/language.dat.d /etc/texmf/language.def.d /etc/texmf/updmap.d /etc/texmf/web2c"
CXXFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -pipe"
DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles"
FEATURES="assume-digests binpkg-logs distlocks fixlafiles fixpackages news parallel-fetch protect-owned sandbox sfperms strict unknown-features-warn unmerge-logs unmerge-orphans userfetch"
FFLAGS=""
GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://mirrors.163.com/gentoo/"
LANG="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LC_ALL="zh_CN.UTF-8"
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--as-needed"
MAKEOPTS="-j2"
PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages"
PORTAGE_CONFIGROOT="/"
PORTAGE_RSYNC_OPTS="--recursive --links --safe-links --perms --times --compress --force --whole-file --delete --stats --timeout=180 --exclude=/distfiles --exclude=/local --exclude=/packages"
PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp"
PORTDIR="/usr/portage"
PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/var/lib/layman/gentoo-china /var/lib/layman/desktop-effects"
SYNC="rsync://rsync.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage"
USE="X a52 aac acl acpi adplug alsa berkdb bluetooth branding bs2b bzip2 cairo cdda cdr cjk cli connection-sharing consolekit cracklib crypt cue cups cxx dbus dhclient dhcpcd dri drm dts dvd dvdr eds embeded emboss encode evo exif fam ffmpeg firefox flac fluidsynth fortran gdbm gdu gif gnome gnome-keyring gnutls gpm gstreamer gtk iconv ipv6 jack jpeg lame lcms ldap libnotify libsamplerate lirc mad midi mikmod mms mng modules mp3 mp4 mpeg mtp mudflap ncurses networkmanager nls nptl nptlonly nss ogg opengl openmp pam pango pcre pdf perl png policykit ppds pppd python qt3support qt4 readline resolvconf scrobbler sdl session sid sndfile spell sse2 ssl startup-notification svg sysfs tcpd threads tiff truetype udev unicode usb vaapi vorbis wavpack wma x264 x86 xcb xcomposite xetex xml xorg xulrunner xv xvid zlib" ALSA_CARDS="ali5451 als4000 atiixp atiixp-modem bt87x ca0106 cmipci emu10k1 emu10k1x ens1370 ens1371 es1938 es1968 fm801 hda-intel intel8x0 intel8x0m maestro3 trident usb-audio via82xx via82xx-modem ymfpci" ALSA_PCM_PLUGINS="adpcm alaw asym copy dmix dshare dsnoop empty extplug file hooks iec958 ioplug ladspa lfloat linear meter mmap_emul mulaw multi null plug rate route share shm softvol" APACHE2_MODULES="actions alias auth_basic authn_alias authn_anon authn_dbm authn_default authn_file authz_dbm authz_default authz_groupfile authz_host authz_owner authz_user autoindex cache cgi cgid dav dav_fs dav_lock deflate dir disk_cache env expires ext_filter file_cache filter headers include info log_config logio mem_cache mime mime_magic negotiation rewrite setenvif speling status unique_id userdir usertrack vhost_alias" CAMERAS="ptp2" COLLECTD_PLUGINS="df interface irq load memory rrdtool swap syslog" ELIBC="glibc" GPSD_PROTOCOLS="ashtech aivdm earthmate evermore fv18 garmin garmintxt gpsclock itrax mtk3301 nmea ntrip navcom oceanserver oldstyle oncore rtcm104v2 rtcm104v3 sirf superstar2 timing tsip tripmate tnt ubx" INPUT_DEVICES="evdev keyboard mouse synaptics virtualbox" KERNEL="linux" LCD_DEVICES="bayrad cfontz cfontz633 glk hd44780 lb216 lcdm001 mtxorb ncurses text" PHP_TARGETS="php5-3" RUBY_TARGETS="ruby18" USERLAND="GNU" VIDEO_CARDS="radeon intel" XTABLES_ADDONS="quota2 psd pknock lscan length2 ipv4options ipset ipp2p iface geoip fuzzy condition tee tarpit sysrq steal rawnat logmark ipmark dhcpmac delude chaos account" 
Unset:  CPPFLAGS, CTARGET, EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS, INSTALL_MASK, LINGUAS, PORTAGE_BUNZIP2_COMMAND, PORTAGE_COMPRESS, PORTAGE_COMPRESS_FLAGS, PORTAGE_RSYNC_EXTRA_OPTS

Anyone could offer me some help?

peterius · Post by **peterius** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 12:59 pm

The Intel GMA will be a lot slower than the Radeon, assuming you can get the Radeon to work.

kkspeed · Post by **kkspeed** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 1:43 pm

peterius wrote:The Intel GMA will be a lot slower than the Radeon, assuming you can get the Radeon to work.

I can get radeon to work and can enable VGA Switcheroo. But I find that radeon cost too much power and it's extremely hot while running.
So I have no choice but switch it off.

Intel GMA is slow.. but I think at least it should be able to render the scrolling terminal without any problem ... I'm not sure if the 2D acceleration is
enabled -- btw how can I test if 2D acceleration is on?

peterius · Post by **peterius** » Sun Apr 17, 2011 2:34 pm

There's several console drivers, maybe its not using the one that's accelerated. I don't remember how to check that but there might be some boot command line option that would help.

kkspeed · Post by **kkspeed** » Mon Apr 18, 2011 12:31 am

peterius wrote:There's several console drivers, maybe its not using the one that's accelerated. I don't remember how to check that but there might be some boot command line option that would help.

Thank you, but in a text-only console (such as the one when you type Ctrl+Alt+F1), it runs extremely fast. The problem do occur, however, when I try to run Vim in a terminal
simulator, no matter what it is, roxterm, urxvt, terminal in XFCE and so on...