*grumble*
(I *swear* I'd tested with only a clean "weave" only before, but ....)
So, I narrowed it down to the use of APM. If APM was enabled in the kernel,
*no matter* what options were set in XFree86, I'd get clock slowdowns. So,
I umounted /proc, and tried it again- no slowdown! I downloaded the code,
looked at the linux-specific APM stuff, and even binary edited XFree86 so
that it wouldn't try and open /proc/apm (and by extention, /dev/apm_bios) -
but that didn't work either. So, although I *swear* I started X in a known
minimal state when trying these tests before, I started looking at my
default X applications.
Turns out that in my .xinitrc is this line:
xapm -geometry 150x20+0-0 &
and "man xapm" has this little gem:
----
-delay delay
Sets the number of seconds delay between each update. The default is 1.
----
Figuring that the BIOS call is expensive, I changed that default value to be
120 seconds, and sure enough, that appears to have fixed things.
(Doing a "fuser /proc/apm" makes it appear that the device is opened *every*
time it's read, which can't be good for thruput, as God only knows what the
apm proc driver has to do on that open()- so I'll be sending a note to
the "Xapm" maintainer about that and maybe changing the default polling
time, too if when I download the latest version things work the same.)
My apologies to the Xfree project; your product in fact works very well.
-Kenny, glad this is over
--
Kenneth R. Crudup Sr. SW Engineer, Scott County Consulting, Washington, D.C.
Home1: PO Box 914 Silver Spring, MD 20910-0914 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home2: 38010 Village Cmn. #217 Fremont, CA 94536-7525 (510) 745-0101
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