[Nouveau] nouveau slower than nv and vesa on quadro 135M

[Maarten Maathuis]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Helge Hafting
<helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
> Maarten Maathuis wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 12:17 PM, Helge Hafting
>> <helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
>>>
>>> I followed the advice at
>>> http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/DebianInstall
>>> in order to test nouveau with debian.
>>>
>>> I found that nouveau works well with the laptop where I occationally
>>> connect another monitor. The xrandr stuff is perfect.
>>>
>>> But performance is low for some uses:
>>> * I first noticed that the default X background (a pattern) was painted
>>>  rather slowly. A solid color background is much faster though. The
>>>  vesa driver does this pattern visibly faster. With nouveau,
>>>  one sees the pattern coming down the screen. With vesa,
>>>  it just appears.
>>
>> Known xserver/exa problem, fixed in master (from what i was told), but
>> xserver-1.6.0 will the first release to contain it.
>>
>>> * The car navigation program "navit" is unuseable with nouveau. I paints
>>>  a map every second (due to gps updates.) However, it locks X
>>>  completely for 10-15 seconds before the map appear. Nothing at
>>>  all happens on screen. I can move the mouse, but no windows update
>>>  at all. Then the map suddenly appears, and the load meter update,
>>>  showing that one cpu core was 100% busy during those 10 seconds.
>>>
>>>  Navit paints maps using polylines, filled polygons, and occational
>>>  bitmaps. An extremely small window works, anything big enough for
>>>  navigation is way too much. Vesa has no problems though.
>>
>> If this is what i think it is, then this should be better in xserver
>> 1.5.0, but if not, some profiling should reveal the problem.
>
> It is better, but not solved. A full screen map with few details now
> paints in 2s instead of 10s.  Definitely improvement, but not yet
> useable for me.

A profile of running this application would be useful (with nouveau
and xorg symbols). I have some suspicions as to the cause,
but some facts would be nice to have. Either oprofile or sysprof will
do, for oprofile we have a wiki page:
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/OProfile

>>
>>> The machine is a Dell latitude D830 laptop, with a core2duo in 64-bit
>>> mode. I use debian testing, with various X packages from
>>> unstable/experimental as needed.
>>> The graphics card identifies itself as:
>>> VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 135M (rev a1)
>>>
>>> I also found that nouveau needs X 1.4.2, it fails with X 1.5.0. That is
>>> ok, but the performance problems makes it unuseable.
>>
>> Why does 1.5.0 fail? A xorg log would be nice.
>
> My fault, I built with the 1.4.2 dev library. After correcting that,
> nouveau works with X 1.5.0.
>
> Firefox and such is fine, but the car navigation program is still too slow.
>
> Helge Hafting
>
>