Re: Serious performance regression in Wine applications and Linux 2.6.24.*

From: Ray Lee
Date: Tue Mar 25 2008 - 11:49:31 EST


On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 5:12 AM, Kai <epimetreus@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:47:52 -0700, "Ray Lee" <ray-lk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> said:
>
>
> > On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 7:49 PM, Kai <epimetreus@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > Performance degrades by about 60% when I run Wine under any of the
> > > 2.6.24.* kernels. Attached are the output of lspci -vv and the two
> > > config files of each kernel.
> > >
> > > I upgraded to 2.6.24, back to 2.6.23.(not sure), then tried 2.6.24.1 and
> > > 2.6.24.3 and the issue is present in both; it's severe enough that Wine
> > > apps are virtually unusable for me with this version of the kernel; I'm
> > > having to use 2.6.23 until this somehow is resolved.
> > >
> > > I'd like some help figuring out why this performance regression exists,
> > > and what can be done to mitigate it.
> >
> > As wine has a 'wineserver' running in a separate process, it may be
> > related to scheduler changes.
> >
> > Regardless, if you have the time, please retest using he latest git
> > head (or nightly snapshot), and see if the performance regression is
> > still there, and report back. (There have been a lot of changes
> > between 2.6.24 and current git head that impact the scheduler.)
> >
> > Please ensure that the fair group scheduler is disabled in your tests
> > (just as you have in your 2.6.24 config you attached).
>
> As mentioned in another response, it was happening as recently as
> 2.6.25-rc6-git7; I'm currently performing a git bisect between 2.6.23
> and 2.6.24, unless someone has a better idea; it seems my best option,
> as I'm not really very experienced with kernel hacking or debugging.
>

Andi's idea of looking for excessive context switches is good -- I
didn't see a response to that one. Other than that, if you're only
noticing the issue in 3d games, then it could be several things (not
just the scheduler). Even just a few bisects (or testings of nightly
snapshots) would help narrow it down.

Ray
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