Author Topic: X, Transparency, and CPU Usage  (Read 3096 times)

dopey

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X, Transparency, and CPU Usage
« on: August 13, 2007, 11:33:49 pm »
Eventually, I got the Orbiter to work with UI2. The only problem was that I couldn't turn on alpha blending even though DRI and composite was all working fine. Still, I was willing to live with this.

However, when I first installed the core it was using another monitor and when I connected the monitor it was going to use for good it recreated the xorg.conf and enabled transparency. I'm really not sure why it did this, but now the CPU usage for the X process gets progressively higher until it reaches around 100% (takes about 5 minutes) and makes the system useless. Note that it only does this when the Orbiter is drawing on the screen, otherwise the X process has normal CPU usage. I've tried disabling the composite extension in xorg.conf, but then then Orbiter get stuck in an endless loop saying that it couldn't enable transparency. I also tried changing the orbiter UI to not use transparency, but the admin site doesn't allow me to change those options.

At this point the Media Director is unusable, so any help would be much appreciated. I'm running an AMD X2 4200+ on a ASUS A8V-MX motherboard with an Nvidia 6200 AGP video card.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also tried updating the Nvidia drivers to 100.14, but it didn't have any effect.
« Last Edit: August 13, 2007, 11:42:56 pm by dopey »

dopey

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Re: X, Transparency, and CPU Usage
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2007, 04:57:32 am »
Ok, I'm not sure why transparency was suddenly enabled or what was causing the CPU Usage to spike with transparency. The CPU Usage thing seems like that old Nvidia bug where CPU Usage spikes after a good amount of use (usually at least a few hours to days though). I haven't had a problem with Nvidia and Xorg for a long time though... Of course I'm used to using Gentoo, not Ubuntu...

With that said, I was able to get everything working again, by disabling alpha-blending. In order to do that I had launch /usr/pluto/bin/AVWizard_Run.sh manually from the console. If I tried any other way it got stuck in an endless loop while trying to load X... Also since I have the TV connected to the DVI port the "1" key on the keyboard needed to be held down while the script was loading to force the output to DVI.

Please note that you do not have to choose UI1 (usually) and you should first try UI2 in normal mode (the second option).

I hope this helps others.

GoManutd

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Re: X, Transparency, and CPU Usage
« Reply #2 on: August 21, 2007, 09:59:36 pm »
Well I had the same problem...  I did an install using the Quick DVD and was getting repetitive MDADM errors and also RECV errors that I'm assuming are related to X.

I logged into the box to get to a CLI using the default userid/passwd of linuxmce.  I manually ran the AV wizard and was able to get to the MCE launch manager...  So far, so good, MCE is downloading updates and hopefully everything will work after this...