Nouveau - Sep 2008 - nouveau slower than nv and vesa on quadro 135M

I followed the advice at
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
in order to test nouveau with debian.

I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I occationally
connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.

But performance is low for some uses:
* I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was painted
   rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
   vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
   one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
   it just appears.

* The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with nouveau. I
paints
   a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X 	
   completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
   all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
   at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
   showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.

   Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
   bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
   navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.

The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in 64-bit 
mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from 
unstable/experimental as needed.
The graphics card identifies itself as:
VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev a1)

I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0. That is 
ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.

Helge Hafting

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Helge Hafting
<helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
> I followed the advice at
> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
> in order to test nouveau with debian.
>
> I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I occationally
> connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.
>
> But performance is low for some uses:
> * I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was painted
>   rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
>   vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
>   one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
>   it just appears.
Known xserver/exa problem, fixed in master (from what i was told), but
xserver-1.6.0 will the first release to contain it.
>
> * The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with nouveau. I
paints
>   a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X
>   completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
>   all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
>   at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
>   showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.
>
>   Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
>   bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
>   navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.
If this is what i think it is, then this should be better in xserver
1.5.0, but if not, some profiling should reveal the problem.
>
> The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in 64-bit
> mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from
> unstable/experimental as needed.
> The graphics card identifies itself as:
> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev a1)
>
> I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0. That is
> ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.
Why does 1.5.0 fail? A xorg log would be nice.
>
> Helge Hafting
> _______________________________________________
> Nouveau mailing list
> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
>
Out of curiosity, could you use check the gpu and memory clock
frequencies with nvclock?

Maarten Maathuis wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Helge Hafting
> <helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
>> I followed the advice at
>> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
>> in order to test nouveau with debian.
>>
>> I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I occationally
>> connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.
>>
>> But performance is low for some uses:
>> * I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was painted
>>   rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
>>   vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
>>   one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
>>   it just appears.
> 
> Known xserver/exa problem, fixed in master (from what i was told), but
> xserver-1.6.0 will the first release to contain it.
> 
>> * The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with
nouveau. I paints
>>   a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X
>>   completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
>>   all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
>>   at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
>>   showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.
>>
>>   Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
>>   bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
>>   navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.
> 
> If this is what i think it is, then this should be better in xserver
> 1.5.0, but if not, some profiling should reveal the problem.
It is better, but not solved. A full screen map with few details now
paints in 2s instead of 10s.  Definitely improvement, but not yet
useable for me.
> 
>> The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in 64-bit
>> mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from
>> unstable/experimental as needed.
>> The graphics card identifies itself as:
>> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev a1)
>>
>> I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0. That is
>> ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.
> 
> Why does 1.5.0 fail? A xorg log would be nice.
My fault, I built with the 1.4.2 dev library. After correcting that,
nouveau works with X 1.5.0.

Firefox and such is fine, but the car navigation program is still too slow.

Helge Hafting

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Helge Hafting
<helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
> Maarten Maathuis wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Helge Hafting
>> <helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
>>>
>>> I followed the advice at
>>> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
>>> in order to test nouveau with debian.
>>>
>>> I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I
occationally
>>> connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.
>>>
>>> But performance is low for some uses:
>>> * I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was
painted
>>>  rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
>>>  vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
>>>  one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
>>>  it just appears.
>>
>> Known xserver/exa problem, fixed in master (from what i was told), but
>> xserver-1.6.0 will the first release to contain it.
>>
>>> * The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with
nouveau. I paints
>>>  a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X
>>>  completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
>>>  all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
>>>  at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
>>>  showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.
>>>
>>>  Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
>>>  bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
>>>  navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.
>>
>> If this is what i think it is, then this should be better in xserver
>> 1.5.0, but if not, some profiling should reveal the problem.
>
> It is better, but not solved. A full screen map with few details now
> paints in 2s instead of 10s.  Definitely improvement, but not yet
> useable for me.
A profile of running this application would be useful (with nouveau
and xorg symbols). I have some suspicions as to the cause,
but some facts would be nice to have. Either oprofile or sysprof will
do, for oprofile we have a wiki page:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/OProfile
>>
>>> The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in
64-bit
>>> mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from
>>> unstable/experimental as needed.
>>> The graphics card identifies itself as:
>>> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev
a1)
>>>
>>> I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0.
That is
>>> ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.
>>
>> Why does 1.5.0 fail? A xorg log would be nice.
>
> My fault, I built with the 1.4.2 dev library. After correcting that,
> nouveau works with X 1.5.0.
>
> Firefox and such is fine, but the car navigation program is still too slow.
>
> Helge Hafting
>
>