Re: [Solved] X11 slowness, command line hesitations, and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
On Fri, 2013-07-19 at 11:22 +0900, Joel Rees wrote: I know I'm going to get flack for top-posting, but I'm not sure what to trim (since many mail agents will break the thread on the subject-line change). They are bound to do so because the MUA you used to send the email didn't set an In-Reply-To header (or you didn't use an appropriate 'reply to' option). -- Tixy -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/1374316184.3486.7.ca...@computer5.home
Re: [Solved] X11 slowness, command line hesitations, and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
Dňa 19.07.2013 18:50 Lisi Reisz wrote / napísal(a): On Friday 19 July 2013 03:22:50 Joel Rees wrote: many mail agents will break the thread on the subject-line change). Many? Gmail and? _Any_ proper mail clients? It is not a Gmail issue, only unclean CIA processing... ;-) -- Slavko http://slavino.sk signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [Solved] X11 slowness, command line hesitations, and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
On Friday 19 July 2013 03:22:50 Joel Rees wrote: many mail agents will break the thread on the subject-line change). Many? Gmail and? _Any_ proper mail clients? Lisi -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/201307191750.21033.lisi.re...@gmail.com
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Selim T. Erdogan se...@alumni.cs.utexas.edu wrote: Joel Rees, 16.07.2013: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Mike Kupfer m.kup...@acm.org wrote: Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Thanks for responding. I was wondering if everyone had kill-filed me. Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? Compositing is not enabled, according to the GUI. Maybe I should try enabling it. (My son's monopolizing the box right now.) Hmm. I enabled compositing and, while the blit leftovers don't immediately go away, sometimes, but not always, several seconds after they appear, they go away. I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. Haven't been ambitious enough to do a lot of modding, so it should be. But I'm not confident I got all the implicit dependencies taken care of when I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? On-board graphics on a cheap AMD (Sempron) motherboard -- VIA KM266pro, I think, maybe KM400, + VT8237 -- from about eight or nine years ago. From lspci -nn | grep VGA : 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] [1106:7205] (rev 01) I actually have the same card (in an Averatec 3200 series laptop from 2004, with an AMD Athlon processor) and I might have a solution for you. For several months now, I've had some minor problems where I suspected the video driver was the issue and finally this weekend I dove into the code to check things out. So your timing is good. :) Great! The leftover stuff problem isn't actually one that I'm having directly but it is similar to something I've seen. For a long time, when I turned the computer on after hibernating, sometimes my graphics would be messed up and I would have to log out and back in to fix it. I haven't had it happen very much recently but I'm not sure it was fixed directly because it seems related to my next problem... I use gnome-3 in fallback mode and the icons at the top right --- battery, sound, network --- wouldn' get updated to reflect the current state, though the hovering-clicking functions worked correctly. They would only get refreshed when I went to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-f1 and came back with alt-f7. Yeah, the delayed refresh aspect does sound similar. This weekend I figured out that this not-refreshing is due to the driver switching its default to Exa, from Xaa. When I put Option AccelMethodXaa in the Device section of my xorg.conf, the icons are refreshed properly. And I have no xor.cong. Running pure default. Last time I generated an xorg.conf, I decided I didn't want to do that any more. But I guess it has to be. So I just ran Xorg :1 -configure and it tells me that the number of created screens does not match the number of detected devices. Heh. But it gave me an xorg.conf.new in the /root directory with enough device lines to try mucking with it. Lots of stuff to mess with if I had time, various buffer sizes, BIOS settings (although, with only 3/4G of system RAM, trying to tune the buffer sizes could turn into a great thumb-twiddling exercise. Setting DisableIRQ to False doesn't change things, at any rate. Forgetting the quotes makes X11 not want to work, but the trusty old startx works well enough to keep me in business testing without rebooting. And ... setting AccelMethod to Xaa as you suggest ... ... does seem to cure the hesitation and the trash on the screen leftover from botched blits. This will definitely make it easier to use git and svn. Maybe this could fix your problem too. (This is just a workaround at the moment but I'm going to look into this some more.) The other problem I've noticed was that colors were cockeyed --- like the blue and the red were flipped or something --- when I played videos in vlc. I now have a patch that fixes this. Playing videos in totem also has problems, which I thought I'd noticed around the time I noticed it in vlc, but checking it again, it's a different problem --- videos show as a single garbled image --- and I haven't investigated that yet. I will be filing bugs for the exa-not-refreshing and flipped-colors issues this week but I wanted to test things one last time. I'll let the list know when I file the bugs. I guess this is the appropriate comment on the state of the driver:
Re: [Solved] X11 slowness, command line hesitations, and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
I know I'm going to get flack for top-posting, but I'm not sure what to trim (since many mail agents will break the thread on the subject-line change). The shift from Xaa to Exa is definitely a bit early for a lot of the video hardware people have. How it tends to bite is like this: X11 is slow to respond, has update issues where it may trash parts of the screen, has issues updating desktop icons in gnome failback (and others), etc. This may be relevant to other recent threads.) This work-around seems to be useful in my case and Selim's case: Look for your xorg.conf and check the device section for the display card. If you can find xorg.conf (say, in /etc/X11 or some such, man xorg.conf and whereis xorg, etc.) find the section for your video display card. There may be more than one section, even if you only have the on-the-mother-board graphics. It looks like this: --- Section Device ### Availiable Driver options are:- [...] #Option PrintVGARegs # [bool] [...] #Option AccelMethod # str [...] Identifier Card0 Driver openchrome [or other driver for your video hardware] BusIDPCI:1:0:0 [or whatever the PCI bus address for the graphics hardware is] EndSection Change the commented-out #Option AccelMethod # str to Option AccelMethod Xaa and log out and back in (or othewise re-start xorg). If you mess up the syntax (like I did), you can log in on a virtual console (ctl-alt-Fn) to fix things from the command line, and you may be able to test it like I did with startx. If you can't find xorg.conf (with whereis or such), you may not have one. In which case you can do this: sudo Xorg :1 -configure and it will leave a new xorg.conf.new in your /root directory. It may complain about odd things like not being able to find all the screens specified, but that's okay. Edit the generated xorg.conf, removing all the stuff except the device section for the video card that has the problems. (Yes, that's most of the generated file. If you didn't have the xorg.conf file before, you don't need anything but that device section. I made a /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d directory and saved the generated, edited file as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-disp-openchrome.conf to keep with the current structure of things. Of course, when the get the Exa acceleration problems ironed out, you'll want to remember to revert the configuration. (I copied the line and edited the copy, so I have the original line commented out as a reference point.) (Leaving the end-point of the thread for reference:) On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 10:17 AM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:18 AM, Selim T. Erdogan se...@alumni.cs.utexas.edu wrote: Joel Rees, 16.07.2013: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Mike Kupfer m.kup...@acm.org wrote: Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Thanks for responding. I was wondering if everyone had kill-filed me. Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? Compositing is not enabled, according to the GUI. Maybe I should try enabling it. (My son's monopolizing the box right now.) Hmm. I enabled compositing and, while the blit leftovers don't immediately go away, sometimes, but not always, several seconds after they appear, they go away. I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. Haven't been ambitious enough to do a lot of modding, so it should be. But I'm not confident I got all the implicit dependencies taken care of when I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? On-board graphics on a cheap AMD (Sempron) motherboard -- VIA KM266pro, I think, maybe KM400, + VT8237 -- from about eight or nine years ago. From lspci -nn | grep VGA : 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] [1106:7205] (rev 01) I actually have the same card (in an Averatec 3200 series laptop from 2004, with an AMD Athlon processor) and I might have a solution for you. For several months now, I've had some minor problems where I suspected the video driver was the issue and finally this weekend I dove into the code to check things out. So your timing is good. :) Great! The leftover stuff problem
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
Joel Rees, 16.07.2013: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Mike Kupfer m.kup...@acm.org wrote: Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Thanks for responding. I was wondering if everyone had kill-filed me. Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? Compositing is not enabled, according to the GUI. Maybe I should try enabling it. (My son's monopolizing the box right now.) Hmm. I enabled compositing and, while the blit leftovers don't immediately go away, sometimes, but not always, several seconds after they appear, they go away. I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. Haven't been ambitious enough to do a lot of modding, so it should be. But I'm not confident I got all the implicit dependencies taken care of when I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? On-board graphics on a cheap AMD (Sempron) motherboard -- VIA KM266pro, I think, maybe KM400, + VT8237 -- from about eight or nine years ago. From lspci -nn | grep VGA : 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] [1106:7205] (rev 01) I actually have the same card (in an Averatec 3200 series laptop from 2004, with an AMD Athlon processor) and I might have a solution for you. For several months now, I've had some minor problems where I suspected the video driver was the issue and finally this weekend I dove into the code to check things out. So your timing is good. :) The leftover stuff problem isn't actually one that I'm having directly but it is similar to something I've seen. For a long time, when I turned the computer on after hibernating, sometimes my graphics would be messed up and I would have to log out and back in to fix it. I haven't had it happen very much recently but I'm not sure it was fixed directly because it seems related to my next problem... I use gnome-3 in fallback mode and the icons at the top right --- battery, sound, network --- wouldn' get updated to reflect the current state, though the hovering-clicking functions worked correctly. They would only get refreshed when I went to a virtual terminal with ctrl-alt-f1 and came back with alt-f7. This weekend I figured out that this not-refreshing is due to the driver switching its default to Exa, from Xaa. When I put Option AccelMethodXaa in the Device section of my xorg.conf, the icons are refreshed properly. Maybe this could fix your problem too. (This is just a workaround at the moment but I'm going to look into this some more.) The other problem I've noticed was that colors were cockeyed --- like the blue and the red were flipped or something --- when I played videos in vlc. I now have a patch that fixes this. Playing videos in totem also has problems, which I thought I'd noticed around the time I noticed it in vlc, but checking it again, it's a different problem --- videos show as a single garbled image --- and I haven't investigated that yet. I will be filing bugs for the exa-not-refreshing and flipped-colors issues this week but I wanted to test things one last time. I'll let the list know when I file the bugs. I guess this is the appropriate comment on the state of the driver: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xserver-xorg-video-openchrome --- hardware acceleration has been ripped out of the sourceforge code. Which sounds like some NPE went after the project. I looked up NPE and got Non-Practicing Entity. Is that what you meant? That wasn't what happened for this driver, as far as I know. In fact, at the url you gave above: --- Support for hardware acceleration (XvMC) for all chipsets has subsequently been ripped out of the unichrome.sf.net driver. Therefore your only option if you wish to make use of the acceleration features of your VIA chip with free and open-source drivers is to use this version of the driver. --- Meaning XvMC acceleration support is in the openchrome driver in debian. Here's the story: there was/is a driver called unichrome for these via cards that had both video acceleration and 3d. (The debian package description even has a URL for it: http://unichrome.sourceforge.net/) But the main developer of unichrome thought the code quality of the people working on the XvMC stuff was not good enough and there were disagreements. Eventually, he ripped that stuff out and openchrome was forked. (I've used unichrome in the past but I haven't tried it out
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Mike Kupfer m.kup...@acm.org wrote: Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Thanks for responding. I was wondering if everyone had kill-filed me. Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? Compositing is not enabled, according to the GUI. Maybe I should try enabling it. (My son's monopolizing the box right now.) I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. Haven't been ambitious enough to do a lot of modding, so it should be. But I'm not confident I got all the implicit dependencies taken care of when I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? On-board graphics on a cheap AMD (Sempron) motherboard -- VIA KM266pro, I think, maybe KM400, + VT8237 -- from about eight or nine years ago. Again, I'll have to get my son to finish up what he's doing, to look at the dmesg and /proc carefully. A quick scan didn't find me the drivers and he wants to play with the internet. regards, mike -- Joel Rees
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jul 15, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Mike Kupfer m.kup...@acm.org wrote: Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Thanks for responding. I was wondering if everyone had kill-filed me. Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? Compositing is not enabled, according to the GUI. Maybe I should try enabling it. (My son's monopolizing the box right now.) Hmm. I enabled compositing and, while the blit leftovers don't immediately go away, sometimes, but not always, several seconds after they appear, they go away. I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. Haven't been ambitious enough to do a lot of modding, so it should be. But I'm not confident I got all the implicit dependencies taken care of when I upgraded from squeeze to wheezy. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? On-board graphics on a cheap AMD (Sempron) motherboard -- VIA KM266pro, I think, maybe KM400, + VT8237 -- from about eight or nine years ago. From lspci -nn | grep VGA : 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: VIA Technologies, Inc. KM400/KN400/P4M800 [S3 UniChrome] [1106:7205] (rev 01) I guess this is the appropriate comment on the state of the driver: http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/xserver-xorg-video-openchrome --- hardware acceleration has been ripped out of the sourceforge code. Which sounds like some NPE went after the project. And makes sense, seeing as the problem appears to be delayed video refresh. I think I'm going to put up an IP honeypot for NPEs and start sending the FBI complaints about fraud and racketeering. (Take a while to plan.) Troll is too nice a word for them, we need to start calling them what they are. Again, I'll have to get my son to finish up what he's doing, to look at the dmesg and /proc carefully. A quick scan didn't find me the drivers and he wants to play with the internet. regards, mike Thanks. -- Joel Rees
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
Joel Rees wrote: Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I haven't seen this, nor do I know what's going on, but here are some things I would check if I were seeing that sort of video breakage: Do you have compositing enabled (under Window Manager Tweaks)? If you do, does the problem go away if you disable compositing? I'm assuming that you're using more or less standard Xfce. If that's incorrect, a more detailed description of your desktop setup would be helpful. And do you know what video card you're using and what driver? regards, mike -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/2844.1373837...@rawbw.com
Re: command line hesitations and pixel fuzz (blit leakage?) in xfce4-terminal
More information: On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Joel Rees joel.r...@gmail.com wrote: Ever since the update to wheezy, xfce4-terminal has been slow to respond to a carriage return, and sometimes it leaves graphical update trash in the screen. In other words, rastor update trash -- horizontal and diagonal lines and partial lines. (Could not remember the word rastor yesterday. I shouldn't be losing it yet at 53!) Hidden windows will look like the old static-filled analog TV screen, and the line where you are typing input will get similar trash , maybe including repeated character output. url recognition interacts with the bug. For example, after apt-get update reports the list of hits and gets, I can hover over a url in the list with the mouse pointer and the url will fuzzout or whiteout. Definitely a problem with restoring the screen contents after, in this case, showing the url underline and erasing it. I'd suspect gpm, but it was doing this before I installed gpm (actually, re-installed, because the upgrade told me I should let it de-install it). In active command line, it would be updating the line after echoing the input key, I'd guess. Anybody else seen this? Have an idea what's going on? I'm assuming/hoping it's some setting I need to fix. It would be nice if anyone else has seen it, although, if no one else has seen it I suppose I should start suspecting hardware. Should I post output from dmesg? -- Joel Rees
