Success! Was: Testing the new i915 driver (HD Graphics 4400)

[Arto Pekkanen]

Would you like to elaborate on this "High CPU usage when playing videos"? Did you mean "high CPU usage when compared to previous driver"? Or what are the exact metrics for this statement?

I am a multi-system power user, and I can tell you that in a vanilla Debian 8.0 installation with Intel driver, on my Thinkpad T430, Chromium eats 20%+ CPU when playing HD videos from Youtube. Also, to get rid of video tearing issues, one need to use x11-wm/compton to do composition in both FreeBSD and Debian (or any other Linuxen). The compositor causes further +20-40% CPU usage per OpenGL/GLX process (guaranteed, tested, no workaround). The compositor induced per process overhead could be done away by tweaking driver options, compositor configuration etc. but it requires a lot of experimentation (and frankly, most people just give up at this point and learn to live with either high CPU usage or video tearing). In general, most systems using X.org/X11 is really, really awful at video playback when compared to Windows or OS X. This is why there are video acceleration interfaces, such as Intel VAAPI or nVidia VDPAU that negate the CPU overhead and eliminate tearing.

Plese try VAAPI. You must compile in the VAAPI support in both the player and the AV codec framework. If you VAAPI helped with the high CPU usage, a report would be appreciated.

On 11.10.2015 19:05, Juan Ramón Molina Menor wrote:
>>> With the updated code, kldload i915kms works after some hesitation and
>>> screen artefacts (images not sent to the list), then X starts and I can
>>> switch to the console forth and back but as soon as I open a xterm
>>> window the computer crashes and reboots.
> 
> The changes made yesterday have resolved the issue of X applications crashing and the light environment I use (CWM, Vimb) has proven to be very stable. I have been able to play HD videos at full-screen, browse YouTube, close the Xorg server and launch it again, etc. Normal operation, albeit the CPU usage seems very high when playing videos.
> 
> Thanks again Jean-Sébastien, it is a pleasure to finally use FreeBSD on my main laptop.
> 
> Best regards,
> Juan
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