On Thursday 26 August 2010 13:48:13 Anton Aylward wrote:
Peter Suetterlin said the following on 08/26/2010 05:33 AM:
So I repeat my statement, an idle system must not use substantial CPU time
Oh I got your point. I just disagree on a number of points.
Not least of all what constitutes 'idle'. Just because you-the-user are not doing anything does not mean the system is idle. And I don't mean the background tasks. (Although I've run things like 'powertop' to see where the interrupts come from, and yes the video driver is up there in the top 5.)
If you choose decorative eye-candy that consumes CPU then it will consume CPU.
But do check the archives. In one sense 30% is getting off light. I met an anomalous condition where Firefox (which is gnome-native) under KDE4 with a certain revision xserver produced XSYNC problems. Everything would run fine until a certain icon in firefox was displayed. The Sync (XSYNC) with the video card was handled badly. A different icon set, running Gnome or a small change in xorg.conf fixed it. Eventually the xserver was revised. Just a very specific code path that involved many items.
But if you want the 'dancing babies' of a decorative GUI this is a situation you can get into.
As I see it, this is a valid bug report, since the dancing babies didn't require so much CPU in 4.4, and the same behaviour is present on 11.2 and 11.3, so the intel driver can't be blamed. When the system is really idle, there are no animations happening, so nothing needs repainting and the X server should keep its hands off of the processors, except for moving the hands on the clock. My not-very-educated guess is that the implementation changes in Transparency and the addition of Blur causes the performance regression. Will -- Will Stephenson, KDE Developer, openSUSE Boosters Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org