Josh Saddler

Last night I installed UT2004 on my laptop, after not playing it since June. The laptop in question is an older ThinkPad R61i, with an Intel X3100 graphics chip. I know -- not the best for gaming. However, most online reports I found indicate that it's acceptable for such an old game as UT2004, so I figured it'd be worth a shot. The Intel graphics drivers have made a lot of progress in the last two years, especially on the 3D front, right? Right?

Kinda. After reducing all settings to "low" and dialing back the resolution to 1024x768 (native is 1280x800), the game is playable, but with very uneven framerates. Looking toward the middle of a map, or anyplace with a lot of action, introduces a good stutterfest; frames are down to between 8 and 18FPS. I enabled a few extra options such as pixel shaders and VBOs in UT2004.ini to add a bit more performance, but it's still marginal.

I'm rather disappointed. I'm not having nearly as great an experience as other Linux users, and certainly not as good as the Windows gamers who've benchmarked Unreal on this hardware. However, I did also catch the huge xorg-server 1.7 update as well, so maybe there have been some performance regressions since 1.6. It makes it a little hard to determine the areas that could use tweaking. I don't have anything special in my xorg.conf, just a default resolution. It's possible there's a setting I'm missing.

I'd like to try UT2004 on my desktop workstation, which has a RadeonHD 4550 card, but all reports indicate that even the latest git checkouts of the open-source drivers still don't work with Unreal. Apparently the game can't even launch, much less run at playable speeds. But as rapidly as the drivers are maturing, I'm hoping this'll be fixed in a month or so. Call me optimistic.

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It looks like Abiword 2.8.0 was released today, so I wrote an ebuild and made it available in my devspace. I've been hand-writing these things for awhile. It took quite a bit of research to determine what went into the 2.7 betas, and now I'll have to do another overhaul of the 2.8 ebuild to account for the new plugin system. There's no longer a separate abiword-plugins package; they're all distributed in the base 2.8.0 archive. This means there will be a lot more tricky configure checks and USE flags, which sucks from a flexibility standpoint. Keeping the plugins in an external package was much simpler, so I'm a bit disappointed by this upstream decision.

Still, right now you can download and install Abiword 2.8.0 using my ebuild. While it needs a few cleanups, it will get you set up with a fully functioning basic Abiword install, though the only available plugin (as shown in the "Plugins" dialog) is .odt support.

This new version launches much quicker than 2.7.10, and it seems to have fixed all the rendering errors and even the crashes that happened with basic operations. Basically, you can click stuff now without worrying.

Cleaning up my ebuild is a long task, thanks to those darned plugins. Patches welcome, or I suppose you could always just wait and see what ends up in Bugzilla.

Gosh, just look at all the buzzwords in the title!

As you may have guessed, I'll be talking a bit about the recent developments on the FOSS drivers for RadeonHD cards, specifically for R700 cards. And some other hardware stuff.

Radeon

Yesterday, October 3, I made some big ol' changes to my workstation.

I decided to try out the new video driver stack that all the kids have been talking about. Kernel Mode Setting, git Mesa/xf86-video-ati/libdrm, git kernel 2.6.32_rc1-git3. All that jazz. I wanted to see if the 3D and KMS features were really working on my RadeonHD 4550 or not. I normally run a stable graphics stack, with ~arch Mesa/x86-video-ati/libdrm where necessary to keep up on 2D acceleration and features.

This was a big leap for me. So I first consulted some of the X11 team members, remi and nirbheek, who were quite helpful. I installed the latest git-sources kernel, which at the time was 2.6.32_rc1-git3. Mike Pagano has since added -git5. Next, I downloaded the individual -9999 ebuilds for the git master packages from the X11 overlay, stuck 'em in my local overlay, and merged 'em. Only thing left to do was reboot.

Lemme tell ya -- KMS in action is awesome. The console output is just beautiful, and there's no more flickering when SLiM and Xfce load.

I did notice some minor graphical corruption of the default mouse pointer. However, the corruption isn't present when using any pointer but the default "arrow", and it also isn't seen when hovering inside a Firefox window. I was told this is because Firefox uses its own cursors. Anyway, I reported the bug upstream.

Disclaimer: I know glxgears isn't a benchmark. But folks always want to know its results anyway. I tried running glxgears, which gave me a result of over 1300FPS with desktop compositing activated. My window manager is xfwm4, so all compositing is via Xrender, not OpenGL. Disabling compositing resulted in a 500FPS boost to over 1800FPS. What's this mean? Who knows. Probably nothing. Moving on.

I took the advice of my fellow developers on IRC and installed quake3-demo. Couldn't run it, though. It blanked the screen, then a message from my LCD firmware appeared, some kind of "input not supported" or "input not detected" error. It slowly repeated the window, drawiing it from center to the top right. I had to Ctrl-Alt-Bksp to get to the console. It also locked up SLiM in the background, pegging one of my CPU cores at 100%. At this point, I rebooted just to test that KMS was still working, then called it a night.

Today, I revisited my pointer corruption bug tried the workarounds posted by Alex Deucher. To my surprise, each one worked! Booting with radeon.modeset=0 removes the glitch, though it makes each boot extremely ugly, of course. Specifying EXANoDownloadFromScreen "true" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf also fixes the corrupted pointer, though it may also be slowing down all screen drawing operations by the tiniest bit. The jury's still out on that one; it may just be my imagination. I decided to keep this second fix, as KMS is just too glorious to throw out. I like pretty boots.

I also revisited quake3-demo, since I found some pointers on the Phoronix forums that had a workaround, which is to run OpenGL applications prefixed by LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1. To my surprise, this worked nicely. I tested resolution has high as 900-something by 720. My screen is 1440x900, but I haven't felt like pushing it that far, yet. The game is fluid and playable. I need to figure out how to display FPS so I can properly record what I'm seeing.

With the success of Q3demo, I remembered that QuakeLive has recently added Linux support. I installed the add-on for Firefox and tried it out. Works nicely, though I'm also running Firefox with LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 just to be sure. As Alex Deucher and John Bridgman have pointed out on the Phoronix forums, that variable really isn't the safest thing to do, since if something crashes it can take down the whole X server, not just the application. However, it's also the only way I get working 3D games.

QuakeLive is pretty playable, though the framerates in a few places aren't smooth -- I can't tell if this is because of my card's capabilities, or the driver stack, or the whole weird idea of playing a 3D first-person shooter inside a web browser. The big problem with QuakeLive is that the sound is terribly distorted: the voices are greatly drawn-out and slowed down, like playing an old tape recorder at 1/4 speed. There are some solutions on the QL forums, but they're mainly for Ubuntu/Pulseaudio users. I haven't found anything that works for me, yet. The effects and music are okay; it's just the voices that lag horribly.

I've also installed the latest Nexuiz, version 2.5.2, in anticipation of future testing. One of these days I'll reinstall UT2004, but I haven't read any succesful reports of that game on R700 cards. There's a lot of testing to do in the future!

Overall, I'm thrilled with the new driver hotness for my ATI card. I bought it specifically because I knew the 2D support at the time was excellent, and because there would be so many good things coming down the way for other features, including 3D acceleration. (Yes, just like the latest XKCD strip. I swear, it's like that guy listens to everything I say and watches everything I do. It's really spooky!)

Hats off to all the developers for making it happen. Many thanks!

SSD

After August's fiasco with a defective SSD, I decided to use my refund from the RMA and order a different SSD a few days ago. This time I've settled on a SanDisk enterprise SSD from an HP blade server. Only cost $49, no shipping charges. Brand new. eBay for the win.

It packs 16GB of SLC flash, which makes it perfect for mounting /usr/portage and /var on it. This way I can feel free to sync whenever I want, instead of only once a week or more. My system drive uses MLC flash, so I've been trying to ease the write load on it, which means putting the high-write activity on a dedicated disk.

The SanDisk SSD "only" has sustained reads/writes at 60MB/sec, but that's plenty for syncing Portage, as the real limiter is not how fast data can be dumped to the disk, but how fast the rsync servers can send it to my box. Same for /var writes -- it's mostly just log files and some tiny temp things, as /var/tmp is already mounted on a RAMdisk. No large files that need >100MB/sec bandwidth. I'm lookin' forward to shovin' it in my box!

More hardware

Since September 28 was my birthday and all, I've been treating myself to various bits of cheap hardware. Like a replacement AC adapter for my DC PicoPSU. The current AC brick is rated at 102W, which is way more than I need, but the problem is that it spins up its tiny fan at only 50%-75% load. This means that opening up a bunch of tabs, compiling packages, playing Quake, watching large-sized Hulu videos and whatnot turns on the fan right away. And it's the world's most annoying fan. It's loud, whiny, it hisses, and it blows the bad smell of very hot electronics out into the room. Lemme tell you, hot plastic and PSU guts do not smell good.

I just ordered a replacement fanless adapter. This thing is high-quality, designed to run very cool. And it's rated at 150W output, meaning it can match my 150W PicoPSU. My max system draw is maybe 60W, but I'll have overhead room in case I ever feel like upgrading a key component somewhere.

I also bought a $40 wireless router, an Asus WL-520gU. I already have a WL-500gP v2, which I hacked and flashed with DD-WRT a long time ago. This new router is so that I can hook up my Xbox 360 to the network without having to run 50 feet of cable across the carpet. I chose the 520gU instead of the gC because the gU supports Xlink Kai, which seems prett cool to me, as I don't have a Gold Live account. Yay for tricky internets. Apparently it's pretty common to buy a cheap wireless router and put it into client mode, rather than buying the $100 official USB dongle . . . which doesn't even support WPA2-AES or any decent security. Asus routers are known for excellent open-source support, and I've had nary a complaint about my current one. Yay for Linux on routers! Yay for online gaming!

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Oh yes, and before I forget, this month's Xfce desktop:

It's October, but my current desktop is so pretty (gallery link) I haven't felt the need to switch for the last couple of weeks. There's another clean version that just shows off the wallpaper in my devspace.