Re: 2.6.32 regression (bisected): Video tearing/glitching with T400laptops

From: Jesse Barnes
Date: Thu Oct 15 2009 - 11:32:08 EST


On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:26:45 -0400
Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 02:22:52PM -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> > On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:14:26 -0700
> > Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > According to the chipset team that form of display corruption is
> > > likely related to RAM self-refresh... Sounds like the display
> > > plane isn't getting its memory requests serviced fast enough when
> > > in self-refresh mode, which might mean we have to program the
> > > self-refresh watermarks more aggressively on GM45.
> >
> > Ok, like any good bug there was more than one thing wrong:
> > - we weren't setting up a fence for the object before enabling
> > FBC. Chris caught this and posted a patch to
> > intel-gfx@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx titled "drm/i915: Install a
> > fence register for fbc on g4x" (attached for convenience)
> > - turns out we *do* need to set watermarks on G4x, despite some hw
> > documentation indicating otherwise, patch for that attached
> >
> > Hopefully with these two you'll have a solid display and some power
> > saving!
>
> With these two patches (and none of your prior ones) applied to
> 2.6.32-rc3, things are definitely better. I'm still seeing a few
> glitches (one as mutt was loading my Maildir inbox) and one as I was
> typing this message in emacs, but it's at best one minor every 5-10
> minutes. It's rare enough to be at most a wee bit distracting (*lots*
> better than before), and I can see the power savings.
>
> If I need to live with a display glitch every 5-10 minutes or so to
> get better power savings, I'll take it....

Oh I think we can do better than that. The hardcoded values I put in
for the watermarks are almost certainly wrong. I should be able to
reproduce what you're seeing (anything that takes a lot of memory
bandwidth will probably cause flicker) and adjust the watermarks to the
correct values to avoid that. I'll try to find time in Japan to do
that...

--
Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center
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