drm-i915kms + x11-intel eats out all of the ram and swap but not with x11-scfb

[Pete Wright]

On 4/14/20 5:40 PM, Theron wrote:
> Please forgive the following for being not exactly related to the 
> memory leak, but very relevant to scfb vs. modesetting vs. intel:
>
> On 2020-04-14 19:44, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
>> I forgot that xf86-video-intel is for the old cards only
> So, new cards (newer than skylake at least) don't encounter 
> frame-tearing problem (completely unacceptable to me) even with 
> modesetting driver and no compositor ?  But the software design bug is 
> still there either way if it can happen on some hardware. Sorry, I 
> have no idea whether it's a hardware timing being configured wrong or 
> a software data race, but when I've heard "use a compositor" proposed 
> as a solution, it smells of underlying ill-conceived implementation.  
> I wouldn't be surprised if Linux graphics has this same problem, but I 
> don't run that.
>
> Shame to see xf86-video-intel being treated as if it's deprecated 
> software meanwhile modesetting driver lags behind it on this basic 
> level of image quality.

to be clear the decision to move to modesetting instead of chip specific 
DDX's seems to have been made upstream on the Xorg side.

having said that there are still updates landing upstream to bot the 
intel and amdgpu DDX's, but i'm not certain on the long term plan 
anymore tbh.  i periodically run the intel DDX and it works well enough 
with our drm-kmod (and forcing the "tear-free" option in xorg works with 
SNA iirc).  I also run the amdgpu with our drm-kmod daily and have no 
issues with xorg there - perf is quite good imho.

-p

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA