F11 rawhide severe X11 latency problems with Radeon

[Emmanuel Galanos]

Replying to myself here..

I've tried running the machine with setenforce 0 for a day or two. I
don't think it made any difference. The problem came up again. Logging
out (which kills the X server) made the problem go away. So appears
to be X server related..

Anybody else have the same Radeon hardware ?

On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 10:35:49AM +1100, Emmanuel Galanos wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Apologies if this issue has already been discussed[1].
> 
> I decided recently to try giving Rawhide a go for my day to day
> workstation. It was previously running a relatively old, but stable
> version of Ubuntu.
> 
> After going through the secret initiation rituals of rpm cpio md5
> madness[2], many broken dependencies[3], package file conflicts[4],
> and duplicate package installs[5], I finally managed to get some
> basic level of assurance[6] of a working system.
> 
> I am currently running kernel 2.6.29-0.215.rc7.fc11.x86_64. Video
> card is a Gigabyte ATI Radeon X700 Pro (PCIE) (RV410). CPU is
> a 2.8GHz Pentium D. 2 GB RAM. All packages are the latest (sans
> WebKit-gtk and devhelp dependency problems).
> 
> Symptoms are:
> 1) Occasional slow (up to 4-6 seconds) redraw of windows when switching
>    between virtual desktops
> 2) Complete freeze of mouse cursor (and rest of X) especially when
>    moving a window or doing a large vertical scroll in firefox
> 3) Symptoms are much worse when firefox is running. Typing out this
>    email (gnome-terminal & ssh) was painful with freezes and input
>    getting lost.
> 4) (related?) glxgears or any GL will lock up X server.
> 
> I'm not sure whether this is kernel or X11 related. Any ideas on
> what I can do to diagnose this further ?
> 
> [1] I just recently joined the mailing list and can't see anything
>     obvious in the mail archives (*ahem* useful subject lines).  
> [2] Ergh, WTF is the deal with no compatibility flag in the RPM header
>     that could have been tested rather than an obscure error message ?
> [3] Yay to yum --skip-broken for saving my sanity!
> [4] Yay to package-cleanup --orphans and rpm -e
> [5] Yay to package-cleanup --cleandupes
> [6] rpm -Va && yum reinstall && find / -exec rpm -qf {} \;|grep 'not owned'
> 
> --
> e