Challenge with Mandrake 9.0 but not with Redhat 8.0

[dhewton]

I very much love Mandrake and have purchased it.

Problem.

I have Dell Inspiron 8200 with Nvidia geforce4 m 64mb card.

Installed drivers and works beautiful at 1600x1400.

when I run glxgears I get 2300fps. This is great, BUT, it kindof stops and goes.

when I install Redhat 8.0 it is smooth as glass.

I installed Mandrake on my home pc with an ATI card and it did the same thing. stops and goes, but under RedHat smooth as glass.

Someone at mandrake expert suggests that the fps is too fast so it causes a stop and goe and the reason RedHat is smooth is because it uses fbdevhw.

I do not want to run Redhat, does anyone have any ideas as to how I can get the fluid video I get from Redhat but in Mandrake.

[bwkaz]

I don't know what RedHat compiles all their software for, architecture-wise, but in Mandrake, everything's assumed to be an original Pentium (i586). This alone gave me a 20% improvement in glxgears' framerate when I first went to LFS (and compiled it all for i686). So if RedHat compiles for i686, then that might be the difference.

As a clarification, are you using the nVidia binary driver when you run glxgears, or are you using the opensource "nv" one instead?

[dhewton]

Thanks for the response.

I am using the "nvidia" with all the correct settings.. (this has been confirmed)

I have wondered about compiling the kernel. If I knew what all the options were for when you run the compile program, I would compile one myself. I am afraid I will miss something really important.

Truly I do wish I could compile my own.

As a side note, re-installed Mandrake and used fbdev instead of nvidia (redhat uses fbdevhw) and the frame rate really sucked but it still had that quirky delay.

Can't figure this out.

If I knew how to get mplayer and xine with all the plugins for playing dvd's I would just use Redhat. I prefer Mandrake and would really like to get it running. I also bought 8.2 and 9.0 on dvd so I am "loyal" to mandrake.


Originally posted by bwkaz
I don't know what RedHat compiles all their software for, architecture-wise, but in Mandrake, everything's assumed to be an original Pentium (i586). This alone gave me a 20% improvement in glxgears' framerate when I first went to LFS (and compiled it all for i686). So if RedHat compiles for i686, then that might be the difference.

As a clarification, are you using the nVidia binary driver when you run glxgears, or are you using the opensource "nv" one instead?

[bwkaz]

The speedup I saw didn't come when I compiled the kernel, although that did help a little bit the first time I did it.

The real speedup came from compiling glibc and XFree86 (and glxgears; it's part of the X package) from source for i686. Although I wouldn't suggest that right away, and since it involves glibc, I'd do it on a separate partition... it took me like three tries to get X to work right. Great learning process, but it may not be worth the trouble.

You say you're getting 2300fps normally, right? How much does it seem to slow down when it jerks like that? Is it running (as far as you can tell) at 90% of its normal speed, or more like 10%? If 90% or thereabouts, then it could just be a glxgears scheduling thing, where it doesn't get the CPU enough. How often is it happening?

[dhewton]

I actually can get it up to 2400fps.

It is not really slowing really, it is more that it kind of stops intermittantly at the same time increment. same with gl based xscreensavers.

Someone suggested it may be the window manager. I plan to try that later.

I had no idea you could rpm rebuild pretty much any program. does this mean that I could/should recompile every/any program I plan to install?


Originally posted by bwkaz
The speedup I saw didn't come when I compiled the kernel, although that did help a little bit the first time I did it.

The real speedup came from compiling glibc and XFree86 (and glxgears; it's part of the X package) from source for i686. Although I wouldn't suggest that right away, and since it involves glibc, I'd do it on a separate partition... it took me like three tries to get X to work right. Great learning process, but it may not be worth the trouble.

You say you're getting 2300fps normally, right? How much does it seem to slow down when it jerks like that? Is it running (as far as you can tell) at 90% of its normal speed, or more like 10%? If 90% or thereabouts, then it could just be a glxgears scheduling thing, where it doesn't get the CPU enough. How often is it happening?

[bwkaz]

I went from Mandrake to Linux From Scratch, so I haven't rebuilt any rpm's from source, ever. The only package type that LFS will use by default is .tar.gz or .tar.bz2, and you do the installation by hand.

www.linuxfromscratch.org if you're interested -- however, you'll probably have to do it a couple of times before you'll have everything the way you want it. The upside is that you have actual standard versions of everything, and you're guaranteed to have an up-to-date, configured, matching kernel source installed.

Also grab the hints, as they explain stuff like how to compile X -- since X isn't part of the base installation, you have to do it separately.

How long between "stops"?

[dhewton]

not long. It is just long enough for the stream to lose a nice smooth flow.

Originally posted by bwkaz
I went from Mandrake to Linux From Scratch, so I haven't rebuilt any rpm's from source, ever. The only package type that LFS will use by default is .tar.gz or .tar.bz2, and you do the installation by hand.

www.linuxfromscratch.org if you're interested -- however, you'll probably have to do it a couple of times before you'll have everything the way you want it. The upside is that you have actual standard versions of everything, and you're guaranteed to have an up-to-date, configured, matching kernel source installed.

Also grab the hints, as they explain stuff like how to compile X -- since X isn't part of the base installation, you have to do it separately.

How long between "stops"?

[bwkaz]

Yeah, try the different window manager. I'd think about a preemptible kernel as well, but that would involve getting the sources off www.kernel.org and applying the -preempt patch (it's in the people/rml/ directory on the kernel.org FTP server), then compiling it yourself. If you do that, make sure you know your hardware, and read the help on the options, even if you think you won't need them.

You can also copy your /usr/src/linux/.config file (from Mandrake's kernel-source) to wherever you decompress the kernel you download, to make a lot of the selections easier. Change the processor and select preempt, and you should be OK.

There are kernel compiling HOWTO's on the Web, as well.