[PREVIEW] Nouveau on FreeBSD (Take 2)

[Anonymous]

(dropping freebsd-current@)

Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org> writes:

> On Mon, 2009-03-23 at 00:15 +0300, Anonymous wrote:
>> Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Ok, this patch should work on NV50 chips also.
>> >
>> > What you get is EXA and Xv.
>> >
>> > You still need:
>> >
>> > A recent -CURRENT or -STABLE.
>> >
>> > git master of libdrm and xf86-video-nouveau.
>> >
>> > This patch.
>> >
>> > Things I've figured out since the last patch...
>> >
>> > On NV50 class hardware you need to have a compositing manager running
>> > for Xv to work.  That means xcompmgr, metacity with composite enabled,
>> > xfce (rumored to work as well, haven't tried).  If your running Gnome
>> > with metacity, open gconf-editor and go to apps->metacity->general and
>> > check the composite box.
>> [...]
>> >
>> > http://people.freebsd.org/~rnoland/drm-nouveau-032109.patch
>> >
>> > robert.
[...]
>> - Scrolling (shift+pgup/pgdn) in xterm is *slower* with DRM than
>>   without it but still faster than with NoAccel. I'm using xterm with
>>   TTF font (DejaVu Sans Mono). It's yet more noticeable when scrolling
>>   in less(1)/screen(1) when redrawing affects whole screen not half.
>>   Besides, there is more flickering with highly updating cli apps when
>>   using DRM. However, launching xcompmgr fixes this sluggishness.
>
> This may be related to compositing with git server.  Text rendering is
> causing considerable load on the Xserver with compositing enabled.  The
> composite manager is only needed for Xv, can you try without it.

Perhaps, you misread. That slow scrolling in xterm was *without*
xcompmgr running. The last sentence was added afterwards when I
*accidentally* successfully launched xcompmgr for XVideo test
and noticed that scrolling is fast again, even faster than without DRM.