[Mesa] Very low Gallium performance compared to Trisquel

This came up in a help-guix thread, and Ricardo Wurmus asked me to

post here requesting that Mesa be built with LLVM to improve Gallium's

performance.

The original post is here:

but in short, when running GuixSD on my system, Gnome is unusably

slow, and while LXDE is usable, trying to play even 480p videos

results in a slideshow rather than a video.

On Trisquel though, even though it's also blobless and using Gallium,

the performance is vastly better, and even HD videos play fine.

I'm not really familiar with stuff this deep into the system, so if

there's any extra info you all need then just let me know and I'll be

happy to provide it.

Anyway, thanks for your time, and all the work you all are doing.

Matthew F. Brooks

On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 02:04:14AM -0600, Matthew Brooks wrote:

I used to use GuixSD's GNOME on my Thinkpad x200s but, at some point, it

started to have the problem you describe. I decided to stop using GNOME

instead of investigating the bug because I had no idea where to start

looking.

But if I can help change some packages and test the changes, please let

me know how.

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

What are your hardware specs?

For testing, you could try building "mesa" with "--enable-gallium-llvm"

and maybe "--enable-llvm-shared-libs".

It could be interesting to see how Trisquel builds mesa.

Forgot to CC this when sending.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

To: Marius Bakke <mbakke@fastmail.com>

I'm using an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (~3GHz, 6 cores). I've got 16 GB

of RAM. My graphics card is an Nvidia Geforce 1060 with 6GB of VRAM.

The screen is a 1920x1080 monitor from Asus.

How would I do that? I tried making a copy of gl.scm (which contains

the definition for the standard mesa package), and stripping out the

non-mesa packages and adding those compile flags, but when I did "guix

package --install-from-file=./gl.scm", it didn't actually seem to do

anything.

Before that I also tried "guix package --install mesa

--enable-gallium-llvm --enable-llvm-shared-libs", but it (predictably,

in hindsight) gave an "unrecognized option" error.

Anyway, thanks for your help, and have a nice day!

Fixes https://bugs.gnu.org/25953.

[arguments]: Build LLVM Gallium drivers.

---

gnu/packages/gl.scm | 8 +++++---

1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 9:35 AM, Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> wrote:

LGTM. I think this patch would need to be applied somewhere other than

master to avoid mass rebuilds.

- Dave

Also, there's a newer Mesa version available (and the Mesa version numbers are now year-based). So if we change it anyway we might want to update it.

On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 09:58:04AM -0500, Thompson, David wrote:

Since core-updates is (still) in the early stages, we could put it

there.

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

Done. It’s now on core-updates (093c6f8bc). I hope this really does

fix the performance problems.

--

Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

I'm uncomfortable adding llvm as a requirement for our most minimal X11

system, for several reasons. Can we find a way to make this optional?

Mark

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> writes:

Would it make sense to add a “mesa-minimal” package and a minimal

variant of xorg-server where any mesa package is rewritten to be

mesa-minimal?

--

Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> writes:

Judging by the number of packages that include 'mesa' as an input, it

won't be so easy. Search for ",mesa" in gnu/packages/*.scm, and see the

output of "guix refresh -l mesa". The xf86-video-* packages include

'mesa' as input, and many other packages as well.

I won't block this, but I will take this opportunity to mention that for

those of us who wish to build GuixSD from source code on our own

machines, life is becoming increasingly uncomfortable as more and more

optional features are added to our core packages. We are on a

trajectory to leave that set of users behind, as we cater primarily to

the majority who use the latest Intel machines and don't worry about the

security of either the Intel Management Engine or our build farm.

Mark

Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org> skribis:

We could somehow provide a way (maybe an xorg-service option) to rewrite

the package graph so that it uses mesa-minimal. WDYT?

This is true, but it’s a problem that concerns GNU/Linux in general;

I don’t think Guix is really special in this regard.

I mean, in the good ol’ GCC 2.95 and GTK+ 2.x days, when D-Bus and its

friends didn’t exist, there was much less to build, right? :-)

Ludo’.

Forgot to CC the list again. :/

I definitely wouldn't want to push GuixSD in a less libre direction,

and I can just stick with XFCE on my desktop and just watch videos on

my laptop (which has more libre friendly hardware).

I also have a flash drive running a different distro for if I ever

really want to do anything particularly hardware intensive on my

desktop, so it's no problem for me to just reboot into that on

occasion if I need to.

It looks like the latest status here (according to discussions on IRC)

is that we’ll add LLVM as a dependency to mesa only when building on

x86_64 or i686. The LLVM Gallium drivers do not seem to be supported on

other architectures anyway.

--

Ricardo

GPG: BCA6 89B6 3655 3801 C3C6 2150 197A 5888 235F ACAC

tags 25953 fixed

close 25953