Hi all,

Not sure where to post this but really need some pointers.

My new build (Dell E4310 laptop, Slackware 13.1 x86_64, kernel 2.6.34.7, integrated Intel HD graphics) is pretty much complete but it seems to bog down horribly with multiple apps. I notice this most with pdf readers, xpdf, adobe and okular. Scrolling becomes virtually impossible and searching takes forever.

I initially thought this was a graphics issue when running multiple heads but I've seen it screw up just on the laptop alone. Below is an example 'top' output when acrobat was searching. It can take several minutes to search ~200 pages so clearly something is not right.

Mem: 8108008k total, 2116164k used, 5991844k free, 50656k buffers
Swap: 3903756k total, 0k used, 3903756k free, 1485272k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2911 ben 20 0 70704 18m 4908 R 98 0.2 0:42.22 xpdf
1872 root20 0 177m 34m 17m R 74 0.4 13:28.85 X
2855 ben 20 0 139m 70m 26m R 33 0.9 8:11.29 acroread
2919 ben 20 0 19220 1300 908 R 4 0.0 0:00.38 top

In fact, just while trying to gather evidence I have effectively brought the machine to its knees. It looks as though X is having a really hard time. Unfortunately I cannot pin down at what point it starts going wrong.
I have also noticed it can recover if I close everything but it doesn't always. Like right now after closing practically everything and reloading it is flying along again....

I believe all the relevant Intel drivers are loaded, the logs look clean (a couple of ACPI errors and an IRQ workaround for the sound?). Is the Intel HD graphics driver flakey or something or have I perhaps left something important out of my kernel build?

Any pointers gratefully received.
Cheers,
Ben

First thing I would do is boot up off of a live CD of another sort, and see if the problem is still there.

If it isn't then I would compare drivers, rip out, add new, rebuild.

Its not elegant, but its a start.

Yeh, thanks for the advice. I think I've already made progress along the same lines. Slackware 13.1 while being fairly new only ships with a 2.6.33.4 kernel. I hadn't realised this is not new enough for some of the modern hardware (i.e. Intel Core i5 integrated audio and video). It looks like Intel are still releasing updates fixing bugs in the integrated gfx drivers (Intel HD). So now I've got 2.6.35.9 and suddenly the CPU is under about 15% load instead of ~150% as it was before. I may attempt a complete update to Intel xf86 2.13.0 but it requires a new X server... not sure how much more pain I want to let myself in for. This may well be solved but I'll leave it open until I confirm permanent improvement.

Cheers

Hi, just for completeness. I've now upgraded to the latest stable kernel (2.6.36.2 at the time of writing) as it contains fixes for Intel graphics drivers, and the most recent (2.13) xf86 intel driver now works. It appears from Intel's website that they are still updating the drivers, and this fairly recent discussion suggests problems are on-going.

I believe this is the root cause of my system lag as all seems well now. (I would add however that things seemed to be worse when running kdm though I've not confirmed this).

Cheers.

OK I've UNSOLVED this thread since the problem is persisting. Kernel and driver upgrade have not removed it. It is intermittent but I cannot pin this down and it is a serious problem as pdf viewers, and almost the machine as a whole, become unusable.

It may yet be a graphics driver problem but I do not know what triggers it. Possible suspects include Opera (and terrible pluginwrapper), mplayer, multiscreen usage, Intel integrated sound drivers... it is as though the machine is paging to the hard disk (which it clearly is not with 8GB ram).

When I have time I shall try a live boot or something. Thoughts appreciated.
Cheers.