Slow xorg after upgrade

[Chris Hill]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2017, Frank Shute wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 09:09:05PM -0400, Chris Hill wrote:
>>
>> Two days ago I had to upgrade xorg (long story). Since then, it seems 
>> that text entry is laggy

[ ... ]

> You saying "...I had to upgrade xorg (long story)" gets my antennae 
> twitching.
>
> Perhaps you could expand on that a bit.

Thank you for the reply.

This all started when I decided to upgrade firefox; it was at 40.0.3,1, 
which is quite long in the tooth by now. I did a `pkg upgrade firefox`; 
the process eventually completed with no problems evident. But trying to 
run the newly-upgraded firefox gave this:

   $ firefox &
   $ /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1: Undefined symbol "drmGetDevice2"

...and `gnumeric` produced the same output. Like an idiot, I figured I 
would try to build firefox in the ports system. That in turn became a 
rabbit hole of dependency issues (which the ports system used to take 
care of for you). After hours of building and failing, I finally did 
what I should have done in the first place:

   # pkg delete firefox
   # pkg install firefox

...and it started, albeit with some errors, which were fixable. gnumeric 
started working again as well. But when I exited X, it (X) wouldn't 
start again. (I use startx rather than a graphical login.) This is where 
the xorg upgrade happened. I did a `pkg delete` and `pkg install` on 
xorg, which got it working, which is when I saw the slow typing.

> My first place to look would be: /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if 
> anything goes awry when X starts.

Good point. There are some font-related complaints; it's looking for 
/usr/local/share/fonts/Type1 and some others (TTF et al), but I'm not 
sure why it's looking there. The correct FontPath comes up later, 
because I put it in xorg.conf, which I hadn't needed to do before. One 
thing that caught my eye was '(EE) Failed to load module "intel" (module 
does not exist, 0)'. It jumps out because my video controller is Intel, 
but maybe that's coincidence.

> I updated xorg the other day with zero problems but there again I 
> rebuilt all my ports (using poudriere).

Is it necessary to rebuild / reinstall ports after an xorg upgrade? I 
wouldn't have thought so, and did not do so. I also did not reboot.

> You're barking up the wrong tree suggesting software bloat in the case 
> of X is the problem. A regression? Maybe. But X becoming incredibly 
> slow due to bloat in a point-release? No.

Just idle speculation on my part. And I wouldn't call it incredibly 
slow, just annoyingly slow. Enough to be irritating.

> You don't mention how you go about rebuilding your ports or what your
> video hardware (and associated driver) is.

I used to use ports back when that's all there was, but eventually I got 
aboard the pkg_* (now pkg) train. pkg being orders of magnitude faster 
is pretty compelling.

Video hardware, from /var/run/dmesg.boot:
vgapci0: <VGA-compatible display> port 0xec90-0xec97 mem 
0xfe800000-0xfebfffff,0xd0000000-0xdfffffff irq 16 at device 2.0 on pci0
agp0: <Intel Q45 SVGA controller> on vgapci0
agp0: aperture size is 256M, detected 32764k stolen memory

The machine is a Dell GX960 with integrated everything; not the latest 
and greatest, but reasonably modern.


-- 
Chris Hill               chris at monochrome.org
**                     [ Busy Expunging </> ]