Hello, I happened upon this thread when searching for information on slow performance with Kicad and the open source radeon driver. http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-ati/2011-August/021077.html
I have a ATI/AMD HD 5800 series video card in my laptop. I've also been rather impressed with the open source driver, even compared to Catalyst (which seems to suffer from many problems, especially with gnome 3). So I'm very keen on getting Kicad to be usable with it. After doing a lot of profiling with sysprof, oprofile and gprof, I discovered that the open source radeon driver works acceptably when the radeon Kernel module is not loaded. I discovered this when I was trying to switch back to the open source driver from Catalyst and there was an issue with the Kernel module loading. >From what I can tell from /var/log/Xorg.0.log there is some rather significant initialization differences when the radeon Kernel module has not been loaded. I tried disabling dri and dri2 to see if they were the culprit, but that makes Xorg non functional (weird square block for a mouse cursor over a black or corrupted display). I also tried disabling many other extensions and modules (Render, glx, Composite), but none of them seemed to be causing the issue. Does this lend any information in regards to what could be causing the poor performance with Kicad? Any ideas what different code paths could be responsible? From a rough view from "top" I can see that the CPU usage is about 80% and 20% for Pcbnew and Xorg in the Catalyst and non Radeon kernel module load cases (good performance cases) and 20% and 80% for Pcbnew and Xorg in the normal radeon driver case (the poor performance case). So it would seem that Xorg and friends are taking up more CPU (about 3 times as much) in the poor performance case. Best regards, Element Green
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