[Intel-gfx] Intel 945GM with >=2.6 and newer kernels: massive performance and or memory leak problems

[Thomas Bächler]

This is a summary of my experience with latest Intel developments: All 
comments below apply to a KDE 4.2 Desktop with compositing enabled on 
Arch Linux x86_64 and an Intel 945GM / Core 2 Duo CPU.

- 2.4 driver, Linux 2.6.28 and older, don't remember the Mesa version:
Using EXA, performance was okay, but not very good. Leaked a few hundred 
MB of memory within a week of active usage.

- 2.6 driver, Linux 2.6.28, Mesa 7.3:
Using EXA, the performance is bad, you can count the FPS with the bare eye.
Using UXA, it is amazingly fast (faster as ever before), but it leaks 
hundreds of megabytes of memory within hours. After two or three 
suspend/resume cycles and one day of active usage, the X server uses 
over 1GB of memory! Even without suspend/resume cycles, it may use over 
500MB of memory within only 6 hours.
This applies to both the 2.6.3 and 2.6.99.902 driver.

- 2.6 driver, Linux 2.6.29, Mesa 7.3
Using EXA or UXA, the performance is very bad (as with EXA in the above 
section), I have to disable compositing to be able to work at all. This 
seems like a huge performance regression in 2.6.29! It is the same with 
and without KMS enabled.
I can't say anything about the memory problems, as I didn't use it with 
compositing long enough to find out.

- 2.6 driver, linux-2.6.git tree, Mesa 7.3
Basically, same as the last section, except the "weird colors" are fixed 
when enabling KMS.

So my question is:
1) How do I get composite performance back with 2.6.29 and newer kernels?
2) How do I get rid of the massive memory leaks I experience with UXA?

Thanks for your replies. I hope me joining this mailing list can help 
sorting these problems out, as sadly the intel driver is becoming less 
useful for me over time.

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