On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> wrote: > On 02/04/2011 02:05 AM, walt wrote: >> >> On 02/03/2011 02:11 PM, Nikos Chantziaras wrote: >>> >>> On 02/03/2011 08:07 AM, Walter Dnes wrote: >>>> >>>> Is there a way to have a real text console? I know that I can >>>> have 2 X sessions on tty10 and tty11 with different resolutions, and >>>> colour depths. Is there a way to set tty1..tty9 to 640x480 *IN TEXT >>>> MODE*, so that lat1-?? fonts would look normal, without killing the >>>> ability to have X run at 1920x1200? >>> >>> Note that the suggestion the others gave about disabling KMS is probably >>> not what you need. Disabling KMS means that it will also be disabled for >>> X11, not only for the framebuffer. As you can imagine this is a bad >>> thing. >> >> I'm aware of KMS because of my experiments with the 'nouveau' driver, but >> I still have no idea what KMS really does. >> >> In other words, I *cannot* imagine why disabling KMS is a bad thing, but I >> would very much like to know :) > > For the radeon driver at least, disabling KMS means that you won't get DRI2 > in X11. That means slower performance and tearing. The non-KMS X driver is > pretty much considered deprecated.
Anecdote: On my laptop, which has a Radeon Mobility 9700 (uses RV350 or RV360), I got 30fps in Sauerbraten using the old non-KMS radeon driver, and only 15fps using the new KMS driver. Enabling gallium on latest mesa improves that to about 18fps, but causes my computer to crash after a few minutes... Both of them are slower than the proprietary ati-drivers used to be, but I stopped using those a long time ago (and they don't support my card anymore anyway).
