Hello, Debian testing has replaced Xorg 1.7.5 with 1.7.6 about 3 days ago. Because i had not logged out of my X session in between, i picked up the new X server only today.
dwm does something very wrong to it, causing it to consume a lot of cpu (say 25-50% according to top with 3s interval) and making X clients sluggish to unusable. I would not bet my life that the effect was not there with 1.7.5, but I had noticed nothing at all, I mean it's only today that firefox got very more sluggish than usual. Experimental evidence: - It is clearly dwm and not another client: the effect is there even when no other clients run but a lame xterm with top or ps inside. - It happens not only with my personal build and patches, but with just about every revision, from tag 0.1 to pristine tip. - I disabled the debug traces we get in the latest revisions from hg, to no avail (btw. thanks for nothing for leaving that on, i had not noticed how huge my .xsession-errors had grown) - It does not happen with any other WM i had on hand (icewm, twm, olvwm, mwm) At this point I don't know if it has anything to do with the graphics driver (intel in X, i915 in kernel) as I have only my laptop at hand. I shall try on my server later tonight. Don't know if that has anything to do either, but with the most recent 2.6.32 kernel in debian testing, I had to disable kernel mode setting in i915 as it was a cause of memory corruption after resume from disk. Because I did not bother to reenable a vga= argument in Grub, I have been running consoles in real text mode for the last few weeks. Oh, and X.org locks up the display from time to time when switching between X and consoles, anyway. At any rate there is no clear indication that there is a new frank bug in X.org, rather there must be something that dwm does or quite possibly does not do (wrt. other WMs) on the X wire, that keeps X.org busy. At least, the X.org folks say that when the X server eats a lot of cpu time, it's not necessarily an indication of an X.org bug (Uriel, *shut up*) but rather that some X clients bomb the server with more or less appropriate requests. What's for sure is that I am not embarking on a gdb/profiling session of the X.org process on my own - but advice and procedures are welcome. I will also try another bunch of tiling WMs among those readily available in debian testing, including dwm derivatives. We'll see who triggers the "bug". In the meantime i have no other option but to revert to icewm, my former favorite, and, man, does it suck compared with dwm... Please help me bring the arch-WM back to its senses !!! ;-) Cheers -- Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com> .''`. : :' : We are debian.org. Lower your prices, surrender your code. `. `' We will add your hardware and software distinctiveness to `- our own. Resistance is futile.
