Month: September 2009

On my quest to improve performance of the AAO, here’s the last glxgears results:

pizzaman@monsterxx8:~$ glxgears

283 frames in 5.0 seconds

845 frames in 5.0 seconds

885 frames in 5.0 seconds

891 frames in 5.0 seconds

914 frames in 5.0 seconds

913 frames in 5.0 seconds

902 frames in 5.0 seconds

903 frames in 5.0 seconds

937 frames in 5.0 seconds

903 frames in 5.0 seconds

885 frames in 5.0 seconds

826 frames in 5.0 seconds

853 frames in 5.0 seconds

836 frames in 5.0 seconds

Been working for the past few days in configuring and optimising Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 on my Acer Aspire One ZG5/110L with 8GB SSD. I’ve been keeping some of the logs of what I’ve done here, but mostly was when I was working with Jaunty. Now all the information is going to be in http://aaokarmic.mooo.com that way I can keep all the data in one place, and nicely formatted.

Took a leap of faith and upgraded to karmic from jaunty. It wasn’t the prettiest of the smoothest transition but it was good enuff. In the end after several semi broken reboots things started working. Last updated I did tonight was intalling the newer intel 2.8.1 drivers, which work very well with compiz, just a minor cursor animation garbage.

I’ve been thinking about switching distros, but I don’t want to lose all the work with the GPSDrive + kismet install. So I want to keep this ubuntu install as an image at least. So the first part of the new set up is to install a PXE server to serve as repository of the distros I am going to test. PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) uses several different protocols to manage the IP selection (DHCP) and file transfer (TFTP) among others. I used TFTP32 from http://tftpd32.jounin.net/ and a short and sweet guide from http://hugi.to/blog/archive/2006/12/23/ubuntu-pxe-install-via-windows

To get both sd cards working I needed to add a file to /etc/modprobe.d/sd-card.conf with “options sdhci debug_quirks=1” in it and also modify /boot/grub/menu.lst so “# defoptions=quiet splash pciehp.pciehp_force=1 pciehp.pciehp_poll_mode=1” is in it.

Well, the intel drivers 2.6 were not the ones who caused the improvement on the FPS in glxgears, so must have been the new kernel instead.

xserver-xorg-video-intel 2:2.7.1

pizzaman@monsterxx8:~$ glxgears

712 frames in 5.0 seconds = 142.184 FPS
3312 frames in 5.0 seconds = 662.324 FPS
3690 frames in 5.0 seconds = 737.900 FPS
3868 frames in 5.0 seconds = 773.471 FPS
3775 frames in 5.0 seconds = 754.883 FPS
3862 frames in 5.0 seconds = 772.306 FPS
3854 frames in 5.0 seconds = 770.738 FPS
3809 frames in 5.0 seconds = 761.785 FPS
3820 frames in 5.0 seconds = 763.819 FPS
3913 frames in 5.0 seconds = 782.482 FPS
3857 frames in 5.0 seconds = 771.238 FPS

Well. Adding the optimized kernel gave a marginal increase in the video performace, but I just got a major jump in FPS:

pizzaman@monsterxx8:~$ glxgears

1978 frames in 5.0 seconds = 395.584 FPS

3534 frames in 5.0 seconds = 706.792 FPS

3707 frames in 5.0 seconds = 741.368 FPS

3673 frames in 5.0 seconds = 734.490 FPS

3637 frames in 5.0 seconds = 727.265 FPS

3675 frames in 5.0 seconds = 734.837 FPS

by switching back to the xorg 2.6 intel drivers (2:2.6.3-0ubuntu9.4) are setting the Apperance->Visual Effects to Normal from the default setting of None. I am going to switch back to the 2.7 intel drivers and see if the performance is the same.

 

UPDATE: The MAIN reason I had this major spike was that the previous tests where done with VNC connected, although the client was minimized and there was not data being transfered over the network, still just having the VNC server connected seemed to have caused a 500 FPS hit on glxgears.

Nevertheless running the kuki kernel still gave a good improvement in FPS.