grayd

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I have installed and used almost all versions of Fedora from F2 through F7 and not been disappointed with any of them. I have just started with Fedora 10 and I am disappointed with what I have seen so far. I know it is early days and I am running a yum update daily to be sure I catch the fixes as soon as I can.

My problem is with the speed of F10.

I have an application written in Python, uses GTK2 for the graphics that runs from an IDE connected 'Compact Flash' drive on a Via NANO embedded 1Ghz PC platform 512M RAM. I use a panel TFT LCD screen. I do not use a windows manager, I boot in mode 3 and start X myself.

The same application & configuration with Fedora 6 runs significantly faster. CPU percentageis about 2/3rds that I see with Fedora 10. To compare it is a simple matter of swapping CF cards.

This is true across the board – X runs slower and Python runs slower.

I am not surprised by the Video – the Openchrome driver even states that it does not support Panel LCDs with my chipset, F6 used the 'via' driver. I am not sure yet how these two evolved but seem to be quite different. The Openchrome driver does not behave very well using the BIOS modes - I doubt this is the root problem though.

Where I am puzzled is with Python. 2.4 in F6 and 2.5 in F10. Why shoud 2.5 become so CPU hungry?

Right now I cannot explain why F10 is so bad. I am forced to roll back to F6 until I have time to sort it out, or a magic update does the job.

Incidentally my application runs on my eeePC with comparable CPU usage to Fedora 6 (ASUS eeePC is Xandros 1GHz Intel with 512 MB of ram).

Can anyone confirm my experience with F10? Are there any known issues with the latest kernel?


Doug

amani

Post it in the Fedora Developers list

Fedora 10 is actually much faster (and esp with Kde-4.2) than earlier versions... you can see the Phoronix site for benchmarks.

Also check with a custom kernel on Fedora 10

John VV

you might need to create a xorg.conf by hand for your chipset .fedora 10 auto detects hardware and uses that . A xorg.conf will be used over the auto settings if it is there .
This is in the fedora 10 release notes.

grayd

Thanks for the replies...
I don't use any window manager. This is an embedded system with the only 'user' side tasks running being X and my Python application. The same application configuration on F6 and F10.

The Python application is in fact two tasks that run independently - with a TCP connection (localhost) between them. Perhaps F10 or Python 2.5 has networking problems?

Re xorg.conf - This was task number 1 to get the system up and running on F10. 'X -configure' might work nearly 100% of the time with an normal VGA port connection. I use an LVDS connection to a Panel LCD - like you would find in a laptop. The openchrome defaults and fallbacks seem to be non-existent so xorg.conf had to be close to the mark before anything was displayed. As it is X does not properly initialise.


The 'via' driver in F6 works better with X, xorg.conf was a special as well. The 'via' and 'openchrome' xorg.conf files have similarities only. (The critical Device Option is "ForcePanel" "True".)

Doug

grayd

I have run a Python bench test using some code that does a variety of tasks but does not make any socket connections or perorm any graphic functions.

Python 2.5 on F10 takes approximately 3.3% longer than Python 2.4 on F6. This is a real difference, the noise in the measurements is approx 0.3%.

So neither Python or the Kernel would account for the poor performance I am seeing with the application code. I am inclined to think it is graphics related, the slow Python performance is more likely related to gtk2 and slow X from the openchrome performance.

I will focus on installing the VIA video drivers from viaarena and see if that helps.

Doug

grayd

I retrieved the latest driver from VIA with:

As required in the readme found in the package I added the symlink for my current kernel:

I needed the following packages:

The drivers compiled and installed without error.
When I modprobe the viafb I get a major system crash. The last time corrupting the disk.

Any help would be appreciated.

Doug

grayd

I have now successfully compiled and tested the unichrome driver. There was no support for the Panel LCD on this driver either. Even compiling with --enable-experimental flag set gave me nothing more than the Openchrome driver.

Note that the project seems to have been abandoned - nothing new has been added since 2007 and the LinuxQuestions list for the project has plenty of subscribers, every one of them spam generators.

http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/

So that was not worth the effort.


Reverting back to Openchrome:

I have now done a line by line comparison between the xorg logs between the 'via' driver in Fedora 6 and the Openchrome driver in Fedora 10. It seems that there are differences but these are most likely to be due to the changes in xorg. The messages from the Via and Opennchrome drivers are very similar. Both show similar "Panel on K8M800 or PM800 is currently not supported., Using VBE to set modes to work around this." messages.

I have tried numerous varients of the xorg.conf file with the best performance comming after switching off acceleration with:

I am now of the opinion that the Openchrome should work but simply does not, perhaps this is a problem between my hardware and the driver.

I have seen a similar problem on the Openchrome website, so I will continue reporting the results at:

chipset.http://www.openchrome.org/trac/ticket/283

Thanks for listening folks.

Doug