Jaunty Intel Performance Fix (Update #2)

ubuntuSince a lot of people seem to be struggling with this issue (getting good performance out of Intel Mobile Graphics chips on Ubunty Jaunty), I’ll give a quick heads-up on my findings again. I’m on an 945GM chip myself, so although this issue probably effects the whole range of chips using the xorg-intel driver, keep in mind that results may vary.

Last time I explained how I installed the xserver-xorg-video-intel driver from the X.org SWAT Launchpad PPA. This resulted in a performance increase and a fix for the swap-hogging problem. Behold, I was wrong about that last bit. Mock me behind the cut.It only seemed to have slowed it down. I’m talking about vanilla Jaunty kernel with:

  • libdrm-intel1 2.4.9-1
  • xserver-xorg-video-intel .:2.7.1-0

I found a Launchpad bug report with the issue:  Bug #360319 in xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu): “[GM45] memory leak causes system to run out of memory (UXA/EXA)”

It seems like it has been fixed in the latest xserver-xorg version, which is still in the bleeding-edge PPA. Since this tends to break once in a while, you can install it at your own risk … Bryce Harrington fixed it at the 28th of june, so it might boil down to the stable PPA in the next weeks.

Note that the bug itself is in the mesa package, so it might have effect on more than just the intel driver.