On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 07:14:22AM +0100, Claus Assmann wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 20, 2020, Nick Holland wrote:
>
> > In fact, that machine is loaded with nvidia hw. If you fixed
> > the video, I suspect you will slam into other walls shortly after.
>
> I know it's a "slow" computer (1) by todays standards, but the only
> annoying thing is the slow scrolling (hit return, and watch as the
> entire xterm content moves up one line before it displays the next
> line). Everything else is "good enough" for software development
> (it might take longer to compile stuff, but that doesn't matter
> much to me - running the regression test suite takes the largest
> amount of time).
Hi,
A few releases ago the old XAA acceleration code was removed from the
X server, replaced by EXA.
Unfortunatly since the xf86-video-nv isn't maintained for even longer,
no one ever added EXA support to that driver. So when XAA was retired,
it left this driver completely un-accelerated.
Scrolling is particularly hard without hardware assistance.
You could try to enable shadowFB support through a minimal xorg.conf
like that :
Section "device"
Identifier "nvidia"
Driver "nv"
Option "ShadowFB" "on"
EndSection
It should be the default, but apparently the nv driver doesn't report
it in the logs and I'm not sure of the status.
>
> > If you really want a dab of perfume on this pig, try a cheap ATI
> > video card in whatever slots you have available in it. However, once
>
> Ok, I'll take a look at my other "collector items" to see if I
> can find something that fits.
>
> > I'm a tad bit curious about your implying the X performance got bad
> > after 6.6...did this thing really not suck in 6.6 and before? Maybe
>
> Scrolling was just fine "back then": no visible delays - from
> probably 5.3 up to 6.6 (AFAIR).
>
> > there was regression in old nvidia hw with newer nvidia support?
>
> I looked at the 6.7 release notes, but couldn't find anything obvious.
> Maybe it is "hidden" in the "upgrade some X SW" entries?
I think the XAA retirement happened earlier than that but I didn't dig
seriously in the archives.
https://marc.infœ?l=openbsd-tech&m=144982511914401&w=2
contains an attempt by mpi@ to add EXA acceleration to the
xf86-video-nv driver. In my tests it wasn't performing very good on
older nvidia cards, but it may be worth giving it a try.
NetBSD also have some patches that I didn't look at.
If this card is a discrete one, get any ATI/Radeon card from the same
era to get something that works a bit better.
But support for EXA is also going away with all the userland side, pre
DRI/DRM 2D acceleration code. To do reasonably fast graphics you'd
need to either maintain a fork of some old X server release or move to
more recent hardware.
Final note: I don't have any remaining nVidia cards in working
condition to test patches.
--
Matthieu Herrb
