radeon EXA performance questions

[Michel Dänzer]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 23:37 +0200, Simon Thum wrote:
> Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> > This is probably rather ungermaine at this point, but at some point in
> > the past week, aptitude pulled in an upgrade (1:6.8.0-1 -> 1:6.9.0-1)
> > that completely fixed this.
> > 
> > EXA is now substantially better than XAA for rendering blended pages
> > in Mozilla with no slowdown on redraws of large, overlapping
> > rectangles.
> > 
> > All is good!
> I agree in general, but with EXA I seldom experience complete drop-outs 
> where not even the mouse cursor moves. Seldom (1 per 5-15 min or so, 
> depending on whatever), but not present with XAA.

If the mouse cursor doesn't move, that indicates SIGIO processing is
delayed for some reason (see Tiago Vignatti's recent post for an
extensive discussion of this). I'm not sure how EXA vs. XAA would
directly affect this. Maybe indirectly, e.g. via different memory usage
patterns.

Have you been able to make out any kind of pattern for these drop-outs,
or do they seem completely random? How long does each drop-out last?


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer           |          http://tungstengraphics.com
Libre software enthusiast         |          Debian, X and DRI developer