ATI Radeon M9000 XOrg 6.8 (Gentoo)

[Marek Wawrzyczny]

Hi,

I have a Toshiba Tecra S1 laptop with a ATI Radeon M9000 card. I have noticed 
a thread re: another Radeon card and using the vendor's drivers.

I too have experienced dissapointing performance when I switch to the ATI 
drivers. Perhaps this can shed some light and perhaps someone can guide me in 
getting this damn laptop to work fully with Linux. 
Btw, the Tecra S1 has a lot of ACPI stuff broken [it's been made MS 
compliant :(], so getting things to work on it has been troublesome...

Here's glxgears output when running with ATI drivers:

1482 frames in 5.0 seconds = 296.400 FPS
1254 frames in 5.0 seconds = 250.800 FPS

and X Server hogs up resources:

top - 14:38:44 up 18 min,  5 users,  load average: 0.84, 0.40, 0.28
Tasks:  90 total,   2 running,  88 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 98.9% us,  0.8% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.3% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    775664k total,   499452k used,   276212k free,    40484k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,   246836k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
15100 root      25   0  114m  68m  47m R 96.8  9.0   1:30.00 X
      
Switching to the xorg-x11 drivers delivers better performance glxgears:

4543 frames in 5.0 seconds = 908.600 FPS
5314 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1062.800 FPS

And X Server doesn't seem to take up more than 5% CPU usage, usually taking 
less than 1%...

However, I tried Composite and Damage with the xorg-x11 drivers and X Server's 
CPU usage jumped to 70%, that's without running xcompmgr.

I am running the 2.6.7.1 kernel with kde.

Here's the lspci dump:

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to I/O Controller (rev 
03)
0000:00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82855PM Processor to AGP Controller (rev 
03)
<...>
0000:00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. 82801BAM/CAM PCI Bridge (rev 83)
0000:00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corp. 82801DBM LPC Interface Controller (rev 
03)
<...>
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon R250 Lf 
[Radeon Mobility 9000 M9] (rev 01)
<...>