[arch-general] Xorg change and intel drivers make me sad.
I'm not sure if the arch-general is the place to ask these kinds of questions, so if it is not, please redirect me to where this is more appropriate. The latest change to use Xorg-7.4 appears to have brought with it the requirement that I switch from the old xf86-video-i810 video drivers to the newer xf86-video-intel ones. Unfortunately, this introduces a number of serious for my Thnkpad (x41): Video (mplayer) in fullscreen is choppy and slow. Complaints of my hardware being too slow etc. All of my compiz-effects have suffered crippling performance losses. If left alone for about 15min, the screen blanks and cannot be-activated. Switches to the console fail and the box is non-responsive on the network. Basically the whole machine locks up. What is the "Arch way" out of this? I heard that the new kernel that isn't in the tree yet is supposed to fix this, and there's also the fact that the old config worked just fine. I'd like to go back, but I'm unsure as to how to do so without running into this same problem when I run "pacman -Syu" again. Any help/suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 1:44 PM, Daniel Quinn <danstemporaryaccount@yahoo.ca> wrote:
I'm not sure if the arch-general is the place to ask these kinds of questions, so if it is not, please redirect me to where this is more appropriate.
The latest change to use Xorg-7.4 appears to have brought with it the requirement that I switch from the old xf86-video-i810 video drivers to the newer xf86-video-intel ones. Unfortunately, this introduces a number of serious for my Thnkpad (x41):
Video (mplayer) in fullscreen is choppy and slow. Complaints of my hardware being too slow etc.
All of my compiz-effects have suffered crippling performance losses.
If left alone for about 15min, the screen blanks and cannot be-activated. Switches to the console fail and the box is non-responsive on the network. Basically the whole machine locks up.
What is the "Arch way" out of this? I heard that the new kernel that isn't in the tree yet is supposed to fix this, and there's also the fact that the old config worked just fine. I'd like to go back, but I'm unsure as to how to do so without running into this same problem when I run "pacman -Syu" again.
Well if you want to roll back to the old package versions, you can use the packages in your cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/*) to downgrade, and then set those packages as ignored in /etc/pacman.conf (IgnorePkg xf86-video-intel). You'd really have to play around with it. Regarding mplayer playback, I'd suggest playing around with the different output types.
Daniel Quinn schrieb:
The latest change to use Xorg-7.4 appears to have brought with it the requirement that I switch from the old xf86-video-i810 video drivers to the newer xf86-video-intel ones. Unfortunately, this introduces a number of serious for my Thnkpad (x41):
Simple: i810 does not compile anymore.
Video (mplayer) in fullscreen is choppy and slow. Complaints of my hardware being too slow etc.
All of my compiz-effects have suffered crippling performance losses.
I cannot confirm these. I had performance issues with it, but the current version is okay (on a 945). Especially the Xvideo problems bugged me in the past.
If left alone for about 15min, the screen blanks and cannot be-activated. Switches to the console fail and the box is non-responsive on the network. Basically the whole machine locks up.
This is unfortunate, I have not yet seen a fix (Jan blamed my hardware, shame on you Jan!). You can disable DPMS blanking to work around it.
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 9:35 PM, Thomas Bächler <thomas@archlinux.org> wrote:
This is unfortunate, I have not yet seen a fix (Jan blamed my hardware, shame on you Jan!). You can disable DPMS blanking to work around it.
I found this in Ubuntu patches: it is a patch to mesa (I applied it to intel-dri) which seems to fix the problem, at least on my notebook which has 945GM graphics. The fact is, it disables vblank, so there will be artifacts if you move, for example, the glxgears window. It's not a problem for me, since I don't use 3D games or similar things. -- kasa
On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 11:44 -0800, Daniel Quinn wrote:
What is the "Arch way" out of this? I heard that the new kernel that isn't in the tree yet is supposed to fix this, and there's also the fact that the old config worked just fine. I'd like to go back, but I'm unsure as to how to do so without running into this same problem when I run "pacman -Syu" again.
The arch way is that this has been sitting in testing for half a year while nearly nobody complained.
For mplayer issue you might find this tread helpful http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=60110 You can also try out different video_out (vo) drivers, to see which one works best. To get the list of avalible video out drivers; mplayer -vo help. bandito
Video (mplayer) in fullscreen is choppy and slow. Complaints of my hardware being too slow etc.
participants (6)
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Aaron Griffin
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Daniel Quinn
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Jan de Groot
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kasa
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Marko Besednjak
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Thomas Bächler