As some of you may know, I bought a refurbished IBM ThinkPad T41 (2373-5U2, iirc<\/acronym>) during fall 2005, and have been dual booting it with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu<\/a> Linux. The hard drive is Windows and Visual Studio 2005 Professional managed to eat up about 8 GB, plus another 1.2 GB for the installers I left on the hard drive, and miscellaneous other crap put the Windows partition near its capacity, and I had nearly<\/em> 1 GB free on the Ubuntu \/ partition, but when it came time to upgrade to Feisty, I was informed that I needed over<\/em> 1.1 GiB<\/abbr> free. Even after some housecleaning, I still came up short, so I decided to wipe \/ and perform a fresh Feisty (Ubuntu 7.04) install. I figured I was probably about due anyway, since I’d been dist-upgrading since at least Breezy. The installation went fine (I did it during a meeting here at work), but when I went to enable “Desktop Effects” (compiz), I got some odd results<\/a>. Actually, immediately after enabling it, the right section of the screen was displaying odd banded\/corrupt artifacts (leftovers, I presume, from switching video modes, etc). I disabled the effects for the time being, and went about my life.<\/p>\n As I noted above, I had problems getting Compiz working from Ubuntu 7.04 Update! I reinstalled Feisty (fresh) on my new laptop hard drive, and spent some time isolating the line that fixed the display rendering. It wasn’t the original line I thought, but rather:<\/p>\n After getting compiz working<\/em>, I was still getting weird performance hits, where I could hear my hard drive click, whirr, and see CPU spikes during really any display updates (even scrolling a man page in a gnome terminal window would spike the CPU). I thought this was somehow related to the new IDE device handling by the SCSI subsystem, and possibly not having the drive using DMA. I followed that hunch for a while, since it seemed that other people were indeed reporting issues of that nature in Feisty. The information I could glean from dmesg suggested that the drive was in fact in DMA mode, but during the course of the investigation, I noticed some questionable SMART values, so I decided that maybe my hard drive was just dying, and bought a replacement. However, I wasn’t entirely<\/em> convinced that was the problem, so I kept poking around. I tried many combinations of options, but eventually found a winner. Again, I’m not 100%<\/em> sure which line was the actual solution, but I think it may have been the following line in my Device section of xorg.conf:<\/p>\n <\/p><\/code><\/details><\/p>\n Full xorg.conf <\/p><\/code><\/details>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Introduction As some of you may know, I bought a refurbished IBM ThinkPad T41 (2373-5U2, iirc) during fall 2005, and have been dual booting it with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux. The hard drive is only 40 GB, which I partitioned as: 26.5 GB Windows (NTFS) 5 GB Ubuntu \/ (ext3) 1 GB swap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}only<\/q> 40 GB<\/abbr>, which I partitioned as:<\/p>\n
\n
Fixing Compiz Display<\/h2>\n
Feisty<\/q> on my ThinkPad T41 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]). One or two Ubuntu version ago, I had some OpenGL performance issues with xmoto (a game), which I kind of resolved by changing my xorg.conf file to explicitly use the ‘radeon’ driver instead of ‘ati’ and forcing AGPMode 2 (and maybe something else, I don’t remember for sure). I hoped that would solve my current problem, but alas, it did not. Perhaps resulting from my inability to accurately describe the results I was seeing, I was unable to immediately find any quick fixes to my problem. I guess that’s why it’s still beta, huh?<\/p>\n
Option "AGPSize" "32"<\/code><\/p>\nFixing Compiz Performance<\/h2>\n
Option "RenderAccel" "true"<\/code>
\nAlong the way I also modified my dric (\/etc\/dric or ~\/.dric) to enable hyperz as follows (alternatively accomplished with the package driconf<\/q>):
\ndric file<\/summary>
\n<driconf>\n <device screen="0" driver="radeon">\n <application name="Default">\n <option name="force_s3tc_enable" value="false" \/>\n <option name="no_rast" value="false" \/>\n <option name="fthrottle_mode" value="2" \/>\n <option name="tcl_mode" value="1" \/>\n <option name="texture_depth" value="0" \/>\n <option name="def_max_anisotropy" value="1.0" \/>\n <option name="no_neg_lod_bias" value="false" \/>\n <option name="texture_units" value="3" \/>\n <option name="dither_mode" value="0" \/>\n <option name="hyperz" value="true" \/>\n <option name="round_mode" value="0" \/>\n <option name="color_reduction" value="1" \/>\n <option name="vblank_mode" value="1" \/>\n <option name="allow_large_textures" value="2" \/>\n <\/application>\n <\/device>\n<\/driconf><\/pre>\n
Device<\/q>section:<\/p>\n
Full xorg.conf Device section<\/summary>
\nSection "Device"\n Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"\n Driver "radeon"\n BusID "PCI:1:0:0"\n# Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"\n Option "DRI" "true"\n# Option "ColorTiling" "on" #already the default\n Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"\n# Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" #prevents mine from loading\n Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"\n Option "AGPMode" "4"\n Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"\n Option "RenderAccel" "true"\n# Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"\n# Option "EnableDepthMoves" "true"\n# Option "GARTSize" "64"\n Option "AGPSize" "32"\n#or "64"\n# Option "backingstore" "on"\n#driconf -> Enable HyperZ for big improvement\n#power saving:\n Option "DynamicClocks" "on"\nEndSection<\/pre>\n
![odd results<\/a>. Actually, immediately after enabling it, the right section of the screen was displaying odd banded\/corrupt artifacts (leftovers, I presume, from switching video modes, etc). I disabled the effects for the time being, and went about my life.<\/p>\nFixing Compiz Display<\/h2>\nAs I noted above, I had problems getting Compiz working from Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty<\/q> on my ThinkPad T41 with an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 (01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]). One or two Ubuntu version ago, I had some OpenGL performance issues with xmoto (a game), which I kind of resolved by changing my xorg.conf file to explicitly use the ‘radeon’ driver instead of ‘ati’ and forcing AGPMode 2 (and maybe something else, I don’t remember for sure). I hoped that would solve my current problem, but alas, it did not. Perhaps resulting from my inability to accurately describe the results I was seeing, I was unable to immediately find any quick fixes to my problem. I guess that’s why it’s still beta, huh?<\/p>\nUpdate! I reinstalled Feisty (fresh) on my new laptop hard drive, and spent some time isolating the line that fixed the display rendering. It wasn’t the original line I thought, but rather:<\/p>\nOption "AGPSize" "32"<\/code><\/p>\nFixing Compiz Performance<\/h2>\nAfter getting compiz working<\/em>, I was still getting weird performance hits, where I could hear my hard drive click, whirr, and see CPU spikes during really any display updates (even scrolling a man page in a gnome terminal window would spike the CPU). I thought this was somehow related to the new IDE device handling by the SCSI subsystem, and possibly not having the drive using DMA. I followed that hunch for a while, since it seemed that other people were indeed reporting issues of that nature in Feisty. The information I could glean from dmesg suggested that the drive was in fact in DMA mode, but during the course of the investigation, I noticed some questionable SMART values, so I decided that maybe my hard drive was just dying, and bought a replacement. However, I wasn’t entirely<\/em> convinced that was the problem, so I kept poking around. I tried many combinations of options, but eventually found a winner. Again, I’m not 100%<\/em> sure which line was the actual solution, but I think it may have been the following line in my Device section of xorg.conf:<\/p>\nOption "RenderAccel" "true"<\/code>\nAlong the way I also modified my dric (\/etc\/dric or ~\/.dric) to enable hyperz as follows (alternatively accomplished with the package driconf<\/q>):\ndric file<\/summary>\n<driconf>\n <device screen="0" driver="radeon">\n <application name="Default">\n <option name="force_s3tc_enable" value="false" \/>\n <option name="no_rast" value="false" \/>\n <option name="fthrottle_mode" value="2" \/>\n <option name="tcl_mode" value="1" \/>\n <option name="texture_depth" value="0" \/>\n <option name="def_max_anisotropy" value="1.0" \/>\n <option name="no_neg_lod_bias" value="false" \/>\n <option name="texture_units" value="3" \/>\n <option name="dither_mode" value="0" \/>\n <option name="hyperz" value="true" \/>\n <option name="round_mode" value="0" \/>\n <option name="color_reduction" value="1" \/>\n <option name="vblank_mode" value="1" \/>\n <option name="allow_large_textures" value="2" \/>\n <\/application>\n <\/device>\n<\/driconf><\/pre>\n<\/p><\/code><\/details><\/p>\nFull xorg.conf Device<\/q>section:<\/p>\nFull xorg.conf Device section<\/summary>\nSection "Device"\n Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]"\n Driver "radeon"\n BusID "PCI:1:0:0"\n# Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"\n Option "DRI" "true"\n# Option "ColorTiling" "on" #already the default\n Option "EnablePageFlip" "true"\n# Option "AccelMethod" "EXA" #prevents mine from loading\n Option "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps"\n Option "AGPMode" "4"\n Option "AGPFastWrite" "on"\n Option "RenderAccel" "true"\n# Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no"\n# Option "EnableDepthMoves" "true"\n# Option "GARTSize" "64"\n Option "AGPSize" "32"\n#or "64"\n# Option "backingstore" "on"\n#driconf -> Enable HyperZ for big improvement\n#power saving:\n Option "DynamicClocks" "on"\nEndSection<\/pre>\n<\/p><\/code><\/details>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Introduction As some of you may know, I bought a refurbished IBM ThinkPad T41 (2373-5U2, iirc) during fall 2005, and have been dual booting it with Windows XP Professional and Ubuntu Linux. The hard drive is only 40 GB, which I partitioned as: 26.5 GB Windows (NTFS) 5 GB Ubuntu \/ (ext3) 1 GB swap […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/ars\/20070502-1525-composite.png\"){kind=link}