A question about "Software rendering for gnome-shell"

[Adam Williamson]

On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 16:35 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 05:12:13PM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 13:10 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > 
> > > Running 'LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome-shell --replace', as proposed by
> > > drago01, indeed starts an intended mode gnome session, both before and
> > > after installing these scratch packages, but results are spectacularly
> > > useless. 'gnome-shells' eats whatever CPU it can get so one can look at
> > > results but no hope of doing anything useful.
> > 
> > CPU usage is going to be higher.  That's what "software rendering"
> > means.  I've not found it onerous on an early c2d, but again, I really
> > need to know what kind of CPU is being complained about.
> 
> This particular one is a 64-bit (albeit quite old) processor:
> 
> vendor_id	: AuthenticAMD
> cpu family	: 15
> model		: 5
> model name	: AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 142
> stepping	: 1
> cpu MHz		: 1600.062
> cache size	: 1024 KB
> 
> on a board with 2GB of a physical memory.  I know some machines around,
> and doing useful job, where this is a quite powerhouse in a comparison.
> When forced with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome shell was taking all the
> time between 94% and 96% of CPU and a response latency for a keystroke
> or a mouse movement was in a order of few seconds.  My guess is that
> more of CPU would be grabbed if only it would be available.  At the
> first moment I thought that the whole thing just locked up and only
> after some delay I realized that I was mistaken.
> 
> I have no idea how much this CPU usage would have to be reduced before
> this setup would pass a "laugh test" but probably 10% for gnome-shell
> would be way too much.

Can you test with a release (not debug) kernel?
-- 
Adam Williamson
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