Re: [dev] dwm does something bad to X.org 1.7.6

Doing something bad to X.org is a good thing.

uriel

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:26 PM, Benoit T <benoit.triquet_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Debian testing has replaced Xorg 1.7.5 with 1.7.6 about 3 days ago.
> Because i had not logged out of my X session in between, i picked up the
> new X server only today.
>
> dwm does something very wrong to it, causing it to consume a lot of cpu
> (say 25-50% according to top with 3s interval) and making X clients
> sluggish to unusable.
>
> I would not bet my life that the effect was not there with 1.7.5, but
> I had noticed nothing at all, I mean it's only today that firefox got
> very more sluggish than usual.
>
> Experimental evidence:
> - It is clearly dwm and not another client: the effect is there even when
> no other clients run but a lame xterm with top or ps inside.
> - It happens not only with my personal build and patches, but with just
> about every revision, from tag 0.1 to pristine tip.
> - I disabled the debug traces we get in the latest revisions from hg, to
> no avail (btw. thanks for nothing for leaving that on, i had not noticed
> how huge my .xsession-errors had grown)
> - It does not happen with any other WM i had on hand (icewm, twm, olvwm,
> mwm)
>
> At this point I don't know if it has anything to do with the graphics
> driver (intel in X, i915 in kernel) as I have only my laptop at hand. I
> shall try on my server later tonight.
> Don't know if that has anything to do either, but with the most recent
> 2.6.32 kernel in debian testing, I had to disable kernel mode setting in
> i915 as it was a cause of memory corruption after resume from disk.
> Because I did not bother to reenable a vga= argument in Grub, I have
> been running consoles in real text mode for the last few weeks. Oh, and
> X.org locks up the display from time to time when switching between X
> and consoles, anyway.
>
> At any rate there is no clear indication that there is a new frank bug
> in X.org, rather there must be something that dwm does or quite possibly
> does not do (wrt. other WMs) on the X wire, that keeps X.org busy. At
> least, the X.org folks say that when the X server eats a lot of cpu
> time, it's not necessarily an indication of an X.org bug (Uriel, *shut
> up*) but rather that some X clients bomb the server with more or less
> appropriate requests. What's for sure is that I am not embarking on a
> gdb/profiling session of the X.org process on my own - but advice and
> procedures are welcome.
>
> I will also try another bunch of tiling WMs among those readily
> available in debian testing, including dwm derivatives. We'll see who
> triggers the "bug".
>
> In the meantime i have no other option but to revert to icewm, my
> former favorite, and, man, does it suck compared with dwm...
> Please help me bring the arch-WM back to its senses !!! ;-)
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com>
>  .''`.
> : :' :      We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code.
> `. `'       We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to
>  `-        our own. Resistance is futile.
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 12 2010 - 11:29:23 UTC