Xinerama infrastructure

[Alex Deucher]

--- Jaymz Julian <jaymz@artificial-stupidity.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 02:02:54AM +0000, Steve Salazar wrote:
> > > > Ok, sorry.  Like I said I don't know X except as a user so I'll
> 
> > >summarize
> > > > from that point of view and not even try to use any X jargon:
> > > >
> > > > 1. When I use XFree on one head, it is fast
> > > > 2. When I use XFree on two heads, it is really slow
> > > > 3. When I use Xig on two heads, it is fast
> > >
> > >just to satisfy my curiosity, on what hardware is this?
> > >
> > P4 2.2GHz, 512MB RAM, Matrox G450, Fedora Core 1.
> 
> That's almost identical configuration to mine (except that my CPU
> is significantly slower than yours).  I also suffered this problem
> with a single head G400 and PCI 2 Millenium 2's - Given mike's
> comments
> about it's performance on other graphics cards, and the mga multihead
> performance on other platforms, i suspect that this is in fact a 
> mga+xfree specific issue.
> 
> I was never successful in having enough system resources to get xfree
> to
> compile on this box, so I can't look at this problem right now, but
> once 
> fd.o's x plays a little nicer with my desktop configuration, I'll
> have a 
> look at it and see if it's still a problem, and if it is, see if I
> can't
> do something about it (disclaimer: no promises of actual action,
> either
> expressed or implied :)
> 
> I will throw out the obversvation that the performance issues are not
> nearly
> as clear cut as they would seem - I really need to do some actual
> objective
> testing before I can comment on exactly what is up, however.  The
> performance
> drop, btw, does seem to be far more than bus bashing, although I am
> sure that
> also plays a part - we're talking an order of magnatide of difference
> in 
> performance here, not just the 2x-4x that you'd get due to blitting
> out the 
> extra pixels.  Also, it's often in small windows that it occours -
> the context
> menu in KDE takes an age to redraw, for example, on my system, as do
> anim
> gifs in any browser, but yet vice runs at 50fps constantly!  Like I
> said, in
> order to actually fully understand this, I need to do some actual
> obejctive
> testing on it, which I don't have time for this week, particularly
> since it'd
> require building xfree.  (Homage to another thread: fuck imake!))

When using the HAL module the mga driver supports merged framebuffer
mode.  that might improve performance a bit.  At some point I plan to
"fix" the matrox mergedfb support with an improved (completely open)
version based on the sis/radeon model.

Alex

> 
> As a side note, did you try the matrox binary g450 drivers?  I've
> heard
> reports that performance on those is significantly improved, but
> since
> I only have g400s myself, I can't verify this.  (Again, I wish I
> could
> afford Xig's rather large prices for multihead configs :)
> 
> 	-- jj
> 
> -- 
> --
> Jaymz Julian aka A Life in Hell / Warriors of the Wasteland / Unreal
> Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
> "Hannibal is a serial killer. He only likes to kill and eat people. 
>  Very few people have `I want to be killed and eaten' on their cards,
> 
>  so Hannibal is out of a job." - http://cards.sf.net
> 
>

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