Radeon 7500 problems, Xorg bogging down cpu, KDE sluggish

frumpus · 02-16-2010, 12:46 PM

I have installed Debian 5.0.4 (lenny, kernel version 2.6.26-2-686) on an old Dell desktop box and can't seem to make the graphics card happy. Xorg is using up to 70% cpu causing KDE to be extremely sluggish.

After much googling I initally tried adding these options to the device section in xorg.cong, to no avail.

Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"

I then discovered DRI was disabled because the Radeon driver was loading before agpgart. I found this suggestion:

Quote:

On Linux 2.6.x make sure both agpgart and the agp chipset specific driver for your motherboard (via_agp, intel_agp, et al.) are loaded before you start X. To make the agp modules load automatically add these lines to your modules.conf:

2.6.x kernels:
pre-install <drm module> /sbin/modprobe "-k" "agpgart"
pre-install agpgart /sbin/modprobe "-k" "<agp chipset driver>"

But there was no modules.conf so I had to create a file in modprobe.d instead and it doesn't allow the use of pre-install so I had to change the syntax but agpgart DOES appear to get loaded now as my initial errors about it not loading before the radeon driver are no longer showing up in the logs.

HOWEVER, Xorg is Still killing my cpu and there is no improvement at all.

Now I get these errors instead.

(WW) RADEON(0): DRI init changed memory map, adjusting ...
(WW) RADEON(0): MC_FB_LOCATION was: 0xf3fff000 is: 0xf3fff000
(WW) RADEON(0): MC_AGP_LOCATION was: 0xffffffc0 is: 0xe87fe800
(WW) RADEON(0): DRI init changed memory map, adjusting ...
(WW) RADEON(0): MC_FB_LOCATION was: 0xf3fff000 is: 0xf3fff000
(WW) RADEON(0): MC_AGP_LOCATION was: 0xffffffc0 is: 0xe87fe800

(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x23
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x24
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x25
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x26
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x27
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x28
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x29
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2a
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2b
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2c
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2d
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2e
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x2f
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x30
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x31
(WW) AIGLX: 3D driver claims to not support visual 0x32

Here is the output of lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82865G/PE/P PCI to AGP Controller (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801EB/ER (ICH5/ICH5R) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 QW [Radeon 7500]
02:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 02)

I'm pretty new to linux and don't know where to go from here to troubleshoot this problem. Any advice would be appreciated! Let me know if you need more logs or details.

reed9 · 02-16-2010, 01:09 PM

Hello. Can you post the contents of the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the whole log file at /var/log/Xorg.0.log

You are using the open source radeon driver, right?

frumpus · 02-16-2010, 03:01 PM

Yes I believe that is correct.

xorg.conf:

# xorg.conf (X.Org X Window System server configuration file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool, using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the xorg.conf manual page.
# (Type "man xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades *only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Radeon"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Monitor "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Xorg.0.log attached, (too big to post)

reed9 · 02-16-2010, 03:24 PM

Have you installed libgl1-mesa-dri and mesa-utils? (And are you trying for 3D acceleration?)

Code:

su -c 'apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri mesa-utils'

If so I would try adding this

Code:

Section "Module"
  Load  "glx"
  Load  "dri"
  Load  "drm"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier	"ATI Radeon"
Driver "radeon"
Option "AccelMethod" "EXA"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
Option "AccelDFS" "true"
Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"
Option "ColorTiling" "true"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
 Group        "video"
 Mode         0666
EndSection

The EnablePageFlip may not actually do much if you're using EXA and not XAA.

adamk75 · 02-16-2010, 03:35 PM

You have direct rendering working, which is good. You definitely want to be using XAA instead of EXA since you are using such an old (well, to be fair, ancient) X server. Using EXA will just make matters worse. None of the warnings in the Xorg log file are unusual.

While I don't know that it will solve your problem, the first thing I would seriously consider is upgrading to a much newer version of Xorg. You could also consider changing your default depth from 24 to 16 to see if that makes a difference, but I really think the biggest benefit would come from upgrading Xorg.

frumpus · 02-16-2010, 04:33 PM

I don't have any real need for 3d acceleration on this machine, I'd just be happy if it were basically functional.

I will make sure those packages are installed and switch acceleration to XAA and see if that helps.

I must say i'm surprised to find that the current stable Debian distribution would include that old a version of Xorg. How exactly would I upgrade that and what version should i go to?

adamk75 · 02-16-2010, 05:43 PM

Debian's idea of stable is what most sane people would consider out-of-date. Just to give you some idea... The X server is about 20 months old. Again, I don't know that updating Xorg will fix the problem, but that's the first thing anyone familiar with the radeon driver would tell you to do.

I'm not sure if it's possible to upgrade to a newer Xorg, honestly, without upgrading your entire Debian installation.

Adam

frumpus · 02-17-2010, 10:36 AM

So that would not be as simple as adding the testing url to my sources file?

adamk75 · 02-17-2010, 10:47 AM

Probably not, no. But I really don't have that kind of experience with Debian.

Adam

reed9 · 02-17-2010, 10:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frumpus

So that would not be as simple as adding the testing url to my sources file?

Definitely not. You risk significant breakage mixing stable/testing repos, unless you really know what you're doing. It would require updating some core libraries, which in turn means updating a whole lot of stuff.

You could upgrade your whole installation to testing, which despite the name can be relatively stable. You can turn your installation into Sidux, which is a mostly successful attempt at a stable Debian Unstable. You can change your distribution to something that provides more current packages.

I also found this fellows blog on using Ubuntu Jaunty packages, which seems a little risky to me, but might be worth a try.

I assume you've tried fiddling with the various options given, and nothing is working?

frumpus · 02-18-2010, 09:35 AM

I am in the process of upgrading to Squeeze (testing). Fingers crossed.

traene · 03-07-2010, 01:23 AM

Do you have better performance now? I am using the same graphics card with archlinux. Would you post your settings, setup?

frumpus · 03-08-2010, 09:23 AM

Oh no actually things are much much worse

I started new threads for the problems in Squeeze, not that they helped me any.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...queeze-790812/

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...g.conf-790853/

The problems I am having now seems to have more to do with configuring gdm than with the video card since I am getting the same problems with 2 completely different cards. I have just given up on having a gui desktop for the time being.