# Low performance on 2.6.29-r5 with ATI card

## muni

Hello,

Recently I've upgraded my kernel from version 2.6.27-r8 to 2.6.29-r5 and I have one quite annoying issue, that is very low performance in desktop environment, i. e. with no other application running, glxgears shows no more than 40 fps and text scrolling in terminal is slow. Such problem doesn't occur on old kernel. I have radeonhd-1.2.5 installed for HD 3200 notebook graphics card. Previously it was ati-drivers package, but since it doesn't support kernel in new version, I removed it and re-emerged xorg-server with VIDEO_CARDS="radeon radeonhd". Here is some information about the system:

- kernel configuration file (based on the one from 2.6.27-r8),

- emerge --info,

- xorg.conf,

- Xorg.0.log,

- glxinfo.

I'll be very grateful if anyone can tell me what may be wrong with it.

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## frenkel

To get good performance with your card, you can't use the radeon/radeonhd driver. You need the official ATI driver, which means you'll have to wait to use a new kernel.

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## muni

Thanks for the reply. The thing is, that on 2.6.27-r8 kernel the desktop environment is fully usable with radeonhd driver, except for applications that require hardware acceleration, but it gets less responsive on 2.6.29-r5.

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## ConnClark

you can get great 2D performance with radeonhd. It sounds as though you don't have DRI working.

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## frenkel

His dri is working, have a look at his glxinfo.

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## ConnClark

Maybe this has something to do with it

"

#  compiled for 1.5.3, module version = 1.1.0

#   ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4

#  (II) RADEONHD(0): Using ShadowFB

"

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## ConnClark

ummmm... after further looking into his xorg.conf

he has two device sections.

He also has no 

Option   "DRI"  "On"

or 

Option  "AccelMethod"   "EXA"

in his radeonhd device section

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## muni

I added these already, but it didn't make a big change and gave some errors about DRI version in Xorg.0.log. In the meantime I emerged latest git-sources and everything runs fine since then. Here you can find better (not mine) description of this problem. It looks like it's kernel drm module issue, but I have no idea how can it work 3 kernel versions back, but not in 2.6.29.

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## DaggyStyle

 *muni wrote:*   

> I added these already, but it didn't make a big change and gave some errors about DRI version in Xorg.0.log. In the meantime I emerged latest git-sources and everything runs fine since then. Here you can find better (not mine) description of this problem. It looks like it's kernel drm module issue, but I have no idea how can it work 3 kernel versions back, but not in 2.6.29.

 

so why not use the drm svn ebuild?

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## muni

Sure, but I've noticed so far two improvements in comparison to 2.6.27: I have no longer problems with shutdown - previously I often ended up with blank screen and computer still on with no possibility of controlling it; next thing is that now I can enable beep  :Very Happy: . Thus I think I'll stick with git-sources for now. Anyway, thanks for help.

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## ConnClark

muni,

Since you get errors about DRM loading with the options DRI on and Acceleration EXA its a sign that your DRM modules are not compiled to the 2.6.29-r5 kernel.

To get them to work build you need to build updated ones from scratch as described here

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/radeonhd%3Ar6xx_r7xx_branch

also I have a patch that speeds up EXA performance on all r6xx/r7xx chips by 5 to 10% you can download from here

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=271923

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