A question about "Software rendering for gnome-shell"

[mwesten]

On 02/22/2012 02:42 PM, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
>
> I am afraid that I am not qualified to sensibly discuss underlying
> mechanisms.  I can only report what I see.  In this thread
> mwesten at verizon.net wrote "the processor gets pegged at 100%
> continuously and it's not usable".  I am not sure what was the hardware.
> I wonder if turning off acceleration changes anything to him.
>
>     Michal

Fedora-17-Alpha-i686-Live-Desktop.iso (RC2) on USB

2.13GHz AthlonXP 2600+ / RV200 (Radeon 7500) / 1280x1024

Fallback mode is fine, but once the shell starts, it's a battle just to 
get System Monitor open and to the Resources tab.  Once there, the CPU 
sits at 100% until I get off that tab.  Very high latency, screen 
flickering, artifacts, incomplete rendering...

Turned it down to 1024x768, no help.

I also tried a couple of other oldies...

2.2GHz Pentium 4 / i845G / 1024x768

The shell does come up and work, but requires a lot of patience to do 
anything.  Scrolling and dragging are jerky and painful.  System Monitor 
CPU at 97%+ continuously.

1.6GHz Pentium M / RV250 (FireGL 9000) / 1024x768

Slightly better than i845G.

"NoAccel" had no noticeable effect.

For comparison:

3,2GHz Pentium 4 (HT Disabled) / Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV370 / 1680x1050

Fine.  System Monitor CPU at 19%.

-Mike