On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 02:51:04PM -0700, patrick charles wrote: >> On Saturday 08 February 2003 05:41 pm, David Dawes wrote: >> > On Sat, Feb 08, 2003 at 01:07:25PM -0700, patrick charles wrote: >> > >How would I communicate this? Somebody on XFree86 working with or have >> > > contact with the appropriate people in kernel/agpgart development? >> > >> > First of all, how are you "killing" the X server? I haven't seen this >> > behaviour when the X server exits normally, and I've done a lot of >> > testing where 32MB is allocated per run on machines with only 128MB of >> > physical memory. >> > >> > There are people here familiar with the kernel agpgart driver. >> > >> > Note that just because top shows that there's little memory free doesn't >> > mean that the agpgart driver isn't freeing it. Also the agpgart driver >> > allocates physical pages, never swap. I'm not sure what the symptoms >> > are when it can't get any free physical pages. On my test system the >> > free memory indicated by top does go up when the X server exits, and >> > this is on an otherwise idle system. >> > >> > So, I'd suggest starting a bare X server (run just 'X') on an otherwise >> > idle system, see what top reports, then exit it cleanly >> > (<Ctrl><Alt><Backspace>), and see if the free memory amount changes. >> > Check the X server log to confirm how much memory was allocated via the >> > agpgart mechanism (look for the lines containing "Allocated"). >> > >> > If that looks OK, then try the same thing you tried before but with a >> > bare X server and an idle system. >> > >> > David > > >David, > >I ran some tests as you suggested. I started up a bare X server using the command 'X' >on an idle system. I then exited cleanly using ctrl-alt-bak. > >I recorded the amount of physical RAM free before and after the X start. I repeated >this process. > >After 13 iterations, the machine became very sluggish. > >After 16 iterations, the machine hung. > >Still looks like X (or, the agpgart driver?) is not freeing resources. >The machine gradually ran out of physical RAM.
I just tried repeating this with what I think should be an even more demanding configuration: 845G system with 128MB physical memory, 1MB stolen memory (preallocated video memory), X configured to use 32MB video memory, so just over 31MB of physical memory needs to be allocated at each server start. After several iterations, I got to a pattern where the free memory after the server starts is 2MB, and the free memory when it exits is 41MB. I went as far as 25 iterations without any change in this pattern and without any slowdown. This is with RH 7.3, using the default kernel plus an agpgart driver patched for correct 845G support. The 2.4.20 kernel should already have the correct 845G agpgart support. The source for the agpgart driver I'm using can be found at <http://www.xfree86.org/~dawes/intel-85x/agpgart-85x.tar.gz>, in case that makes a difference. David -- David Dawes Release Engineer/Architect The XFree86 Project www.XFree86.org/~dawes _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
