Get a dramatic 2D graphics boost on your netbook 28 June, 2009
After having tried thousands of different drivers, kernel versions, patches etc etc… I’ve finally found a combination that made me excited (wohoo!).
I own a Samsung NC10 with an Intel Atom N270 and an Intel GMA 950 (i945). I’m running both Arch Linux (i686) and Ubuntu jaunty (lpia).
Few notes:
- This how to should work with any netbook, since they share almost the same hardware.
- I haven’t used a benchmark, but applications (Firefox, Gnome Do’s Docky, KDE 4 and more), and the difference is so visible that it doesn’t require a benchmark.
- I don’t know if it depends on the lpia architecture (I’m running Ubuntu lpia) or some patches applied to the drivers, but Ubuntu’s 2D graphics are a little bit faster than my Arch Linux installation with kernel 2.6.30 and drivers 2.7.1 (same versions).
- I had the boost in both Arch Linux and Ubuntu, though Ubuntu is faster.
- I’ve compared the 2D graphics with Moblin too, but its newer drivers using UXA are noticeably slower (Firefox/Gecko is incredibly slow when scrolling heavy webpages like facebook or my custom gmail).
- Newer Intel drivers (2.7.99.x and similar) support only UXA acceleration, and they perform a little bit slower than 2.7.1 without greedy migration heuristic (unfortunately that means a big difference). Greedy migration heuristic does not work with UXA.
- With this new combination, 2D graphics are really close to my Windows XP installation (Firefox scrolling).
Instructions (Ubuntu lpia combination, adjust the steps to your distro):
- Install kernel 2.6.30 from this ppa (even if it has the “nc10″ tag, it doesn’t have custom patches and should work with any netbook).
- Upgrade your Xorg Intel drivers with the 2.7.1 version on the same ppa.
- Enable greedy migration heuristic creating an empty /etx/X11/xorg.conf with those lines:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "exa"
Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
EndSection
- Optional: install client-side-windows Gtk+ branch (helps Gtk+ scrolling and resize).
I really hope you will get the same boost I had, and I’m looking forward to newer Intel drivers: it is just question of time… the team rewrote both xorg driver and the DRM code to ensure a great future to these video cards, and the performance drop is physiological to the transition… I suspect UXA will achieve those performance in less than a year…
Posted in ArchLinux, English, GNOME Do, GTK, Howto | 6 Comments »
