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

[Helge Hafting]

Maarten Maathuis wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Helge Hafting
> <helge.hafting at aitel.hist.no> wrote:
>> Maarten Maathuis wrote:
>>
>>> 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
>>>
>> That wiki page doesn't list the first necessary step,
>> which is "opcontrol --init". Adding that might be useful for newbies.
>>
>> I profiled two apps that are too slow with this driver.
>> * navit (map navigation), slowly panning the map across a city. This
>>  panning redraws the map each time, which is instantaneous with the
>>  vesa driver.
>>
>> * lyx (word processor), typing text into a table. The pc could not
>>  keep up with keyboard autorepeat, giving me one to three characters
>>  per second. Each keypress redraws the table lines and the text
>>  in the table cell.
>>
>> I am not sure if I have all the symbols needed. I used nouveau compiled
>> per the instructions for debian. The X server consist of packages from
>> debian unstable/experimental. Please tell if there is anything I can do to
>> improve on this.
>>
>> It'd be great to get this driver closer to vesa performance, for
>> vesa doesn't handle dual screens. You probably have higher goals than that.
>> :-)
>>
>> navit profile data:
>> http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit/opreport
>> http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit/opreport-l
>> http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit/opreport--callgraph
>>
>> lyx profile data:
>> http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/lyx16/opreport
>> http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/lyx16/opreport-1
>>
>> Helge Hafting
>>
> 
> While the traces lack a lot of symbols (xserver's and pixman), i do
> have a hunch as to the cause of the problem.
> 
> Could you add to your device section:
> 
> Option "EXAOptimizeMigration" "1"
> 
> This option seems to default to off for 1.5 (while it's on by default
> for post-1.5).
> 
> If this doesn't help, then you need to get symbols for the xserver and
> libpixman.

I added that option, and it did not help.
So I installed debug packages for xserver-xorg-core and libpixman. Here
are the new results:

navit profile data:
http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit2/opreport
http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit2/opreport
http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/navit2/opreport

LyX profile data:
http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/lyx2/opreport
http://www.aitel.hist.no/~helgehaf/oprofile/lyx2/opreport-l
(No --callgraph, error msg. about an invalid filename.)

Helge Hafting