I fumbled around with Nvidia drivers and this black screen issue for two
days. And I fell into this pit because of the 14.04 upgrade from 12.04.
Grrr!
The original issue I was trying to resolve was the high cpu utilization
of firefox, compiz & Xorg which made the graphics fairly unusable. After
attempting to resolve that issue by upgrading the Nvidia driver, all
went south and the black screen of death ensued.
Here's some commands that speak to my desktop configuration in case that
helps...
"lshw" command produces:
description: Mini Tower Computer
product: OptiPlex GX270
"lspci -vnn | grep -i VGA -A 12" command produces:
VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation NV18 [GeForce4
MX 440 AGP 8x]
"wmctrl -m" command produces:
Name: Metacity
Class: N/A
PID: N/A
Window manager's "showing the desktop" mode: N/A
At the end of the day, I'm not 100% sure what worked as I fumbled around so
much. Here's what I think did it.
Use the following to get rid of all Nvidia bits and rely on the default
driver Nouveau.
sudo apt-get purge "nvidia *"
Then opt for using Metacity instead of Compiz. Those are the two salient
changes I made and the result is a much improved graphics experience
with acceptable cpu utilization when doing something such as video
streaming from CNNx. Firefox still shows high cpu utilization in "nice
top" but that doesn't seem to impact the graphics and especially the
video streaming.
--
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop
Packages, which is subscribed to compiz in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1293384
Title:
Compiz CPU usage dramatically increased in Ubuntu 14.04
Status in Compiz:
Triaged
Status in “compiz” package in Ubuntu:
Triaged
Bug description:
It appears that the workload of low-level graphical operations used by
compiz when, for example, moving windows has increased dramatically
between Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04.
This might not be that visible when using high-end gpus, but should be
clearly visible when using compiz on llvmpipe and to some-extent
invalidates the approach of using compiz on top of llvmpipe as a
fallback when no GPU is available:
How to reproduce:
1) Use the unity-3d desktop in Ubuntu 14.04 on top of a non-accelerating Xorg
driver like "modesetting". Move windows around. Note peak and average cpu-usage.
How to verify compiz is the culprit:
1) copy /usr/bin/compiz from a Ubuntu 12.04 installation. Drop it in as
/usr/bin/compiz on 14.04. Reboot. Perform the same window movement. CPU-usage
should be substantially lower.
This problem also affects VMs running on VMware ESX with a software-
rendering GPU. Window movement becomes sluggish, which suggests that
even with GPUs, compiz has increased the number of operations required
to move windows.
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1293384/+subscriptions
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