Comment # 152 on bug 1112824 from Timo Jyrinki

Thanks everyone for your continued investigations. Let's not despair, the
solutions are there somewhere :)

(In reply to Dead Mozay from comment #151)
> there is definitely progress, but visually almost nothing changes.

In your going through GNOME stack patches, did you find anything suspicious
we're carrying that might be causing performance drops and should be dropped if
not upstreamed? And dropping non-upstreamable patches is a good idea overall.

I wouldn't (necessarily, unless having fun of course) spend time on doing
things other distributions aren't doing, but finding the differences.

> I also stumbled upon such tests
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=dellxps-9380-linux&num=1
> Perhaps the author of the article is right, and the problem lies in energy
> consumption.

Surely that's yet another part of the equation, but I've also tweaked my
performance policies to be balance_performance which matches other
distributions. And I've disabled hyperthreading, and using
spectre_v2=retpoline. All of that makes things better, but not comparable to
other distros.

In addition to /sys/devices/system/cpu/*/*/energy_performance_preference
(permanent via /etc/default/tlp) it'd be welcome to know if there are other
knobs to turn that could be affecting what Phoronix found, but previously I
haven't bumped to others that would be as important.

I'd also be interested in trying out the voluntary preemption, to not rule out
that and since that's clearly something that is not as easy to test (no runtime
switch).

Optimizing for smooth desktop usability seems to be really complex these days,
and it seems that differing from what others do always has a negative impact
due to that complexity. That's a bit sad state of affairs, and lack of
performance work resources put to the desktop, but what can we do.

It's nice though that Phoronix confirms that we're not all crazy. Sometimes
user perceptions are biased or wrong, especially when it comes to "did it
help?" if it's not a huge difference.