Nouveau - Apr 2008 - Memory use and a few other things

Hello,

First of all thanks a lot for working on this free nvidia driver.

1.) I am using Fedora9-Beta, and on my NV17/64mb (or NV18?) powered
Laptop the nouveau driver uses about 300mb RAM. Is there any way I can
decrease that?

2.) Font rendering is very slow. running "x11perf --aa10text" I only
get 40k glyphs/s.
Is there any way I can improve text performance?

3.) I would like to downgrade to linux-2.6.16.60 - because a driver I
need was broken starting arround 2.6.19. Will it still make sence to
use nouveuau, or does it need DRI to work properly?

Thanks a lot, lg Clemens

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008 16:38:03 +0200
"Clemens Eisserer" <linuxhippy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> First of all thanks a lot for working on this free nvidia driver.
> 
> 1.) I am using Fedora9-Beta, and on my NV17/64mb (or NV18?) powered
> Laptop the nouveau driver uses about 300mb RAM. Is there any way I can
> decrease that?
Why do you say it is nouveau taking the memory?
How do you measure memory consumption?
Does running 'find /' after fresh boot raise memory consumption
radically?
Do you get any tangible effects of running out of memory, like triggering
the OOM killer in kernel or considerably consuming swap space?
Coult you post 'free -m' and 'slabtop' (press c to order by
size)
output for cases with and without the excessive memory usage?
Which kernel do you experience this with?

I have heard of two memory usage anomalies, one is an accounting
bug/feature, the other might be a real leak since it increases swap
usage.
> 3.) I would like to downgrade to linux-2.6.16.60 - because a driver I
> need was broken starting arround 2.6.19. Will it still make sence to
> use nouveuau, or does it need DRI to work properly?
Nouveau does not need DRI (which usually refers to the user space 3D driver),
but it does need the DRM kernel modules. I do not know if they are supposed
to work on that old kernel, but you can try.

-- 
Pekka Paalanen
http://www.iki.fi/pq/

On 4/2/08, Clemens Eisserer <linuxhippy at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
>  First of all thanks a lot for working on this free nvidia driver.
>
>  1.) I am using Fedora9-Beta, and on my NV17/64mb (or NV18?) powered
>  Laptop the nouveau driver uses about 300mb RAM. Is there any way I can
>  decrease that?
>
This is AGP memory. It's (usually 256MB of) memory mapped into X.Org,
and it's not actually used (only a small part of it for scratch
usage). All drivers making use of AGP do that.
>  2.) Font rendering is very slow. running "x11perf --aa10text" I
only
>  get 40k glyphs/s.
>  Is there any way I can improve text performance?
>
Work on core EXA.
>  3.) I would like to downgrade to linux-2.6.16.60 - because a driver I
>  need was broken starting arround 2.6.19. Will it still make sence to
>  use nouveuau, or does it need DRI to work properly?
>
See Pekka's Answer.

Stephane