On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 11:25 +0200, Thomas Hilber wrote:
Good heavens, this is all getting rather heavyweight :)
oh - a very interesting fact. that's different to mine (see my output of top below). Xorg takes only 0.7%(!) CPU on my system. Are there some special patches in ubuntu that causes this?
1% CPU is about what I would expect for xv usage - after all the whole point is for the app to write directly to video memory with minimal 'processing'
A skirt around the problem with Google reveals very little - only a string of users complaining that their silly 3D desktop is slow / unstable (who would have thought? :)
This appears be the root cause of our problem!
Does the Xserver poll for some resources not available or something? A value of 40% CPU is way too much. The only process consuming some CPU power should be 'vdr' whilst decoding. Most other processes don't have to do much all over the time.
It should be said that Xorg is idle when just showing a desktop. It's only when video is played that usage shoots up.
We must dig deeper into that '40% Xserver-CPU' phenomenon! DISPLAY environment variable is set to DISPLAY=:0 ?
Yes. I tried also using mplayer -vo xv /video/blahhhh/12313131/001.vdr and that also generated the same amount of load in Xorg. However, since the PC (Dell Optiplex) has onboard Intel 810 VGA, I removed the radeon and tried it. The same mplayer test yielded only 6% Xorg CPU. Still higher than I would expect, but it was an 800x600 VGA display.
Even deleting the xorg.conf and letting the radeon driver choose 'best defaults' I get the 40% CPU load.
You see Xorg is almost not noticable on my system!
Can you strace the Xserver? Maybe you can try Debian experimental packages like I do? Don't the run on Ubuntu as well?
Well, the Debian experimental packages installed OK, but refused to start:
/usr/bin/X11/X: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so: undefined symbol: pci_device_map_range giving up. xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server xinit: No such process (errno 3): unexpected signal 2.
(yes, the radeon driver package was upgraded to the experimental one :)
and now I am unable to reinstall the ubuntu xorg due to circular dependencies and very strange package behaviour (see [1]), so I've given up on this installation. A shame, since I'd done well and not installed anything into /usr/local this time :)
If it would help you I can offer you to make a copy of my entire development system (about 800MB as compressed tar image).
At this stage that sounds like a good idea. I originally intended to install lenny but the Debian netinst + 'testing2' iso claimed there was no hard disk on the PC (I had the same experience earlier that day with a server at work), so I tried Ubuntu which installed perfectly.
Are you suggesting to provide a tarball that I can 'tar xzf' into a freshly-formatted root partition (then run grub) ?
Cheers, Gavin.
[1] root@rgb:~# apt-get install xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core The following packages have unmet dependencies. xserver-xorg: Depends: x11-xkb-utils but it is not going to be installed PreDepends: x11-common (>= 1:7.3+3) but it is not going to be installed xserver-xorg-core: Depends: libfontenc1 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libxau6 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libxdmcp6 but it is not going to be installed Depends: libxfont1 (>= 1:1.2.9) but it is not going to be installed Depends: x11-common (>= 1:7.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
All the Depends: packages are /already/ installed and meet those version requirements!