On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 05:12:13PM -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 2012-02-21 at 13:10 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> Running 'LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome-shell --replace', as proposed by
> drago01, indeed starts an intended mode gnome session, both before and
> after installing these scratch packages, but results are spectacularly
> useless. 'gnome-shells' eats whatever CPU it can get so one can look at
> results but no hope of doing anything useful.
CPU usage is going to be higher. That's what "software rendering"
means. I've not found it onerous on an early c2d, but again, I really
need to know what kind of CPU is being complained about.
This particular one is a 64-bit (albeit quite old) processor:
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 142
stepping : 1
cpu MHz : 1600.062
cache size : 1024 KB
on a board with 2GB of a physical memory. I know some machines around,
and doing useful job, where this is a quite powerhouse in a comparison.
When forced with LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 gnome shell was taking all the
time between 94% and 96% of CPU and a response latency for a keystroke
or a mouse movement was in a order of few seconds. My guess is that
more of CPU would be grabbed if only it would be available. At the
first moment I thought that the whole thing just locked up and only
after some delay I realized that I was mistaken.
I have no idea how much this CPU usage would have to be reduced before
this setup would pass a "laugh test" but probably 10% for gnome-shell
would be way too much.
Michal