Bug 14922

Summary: start X with nouveau uses a lot of memory
Product: xorg Reporter: Olivier Huber <oli.huber>
Component: Driver/nouveauAssignee: Nouveau Project <nouveau>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity: normal    
Priority: medium CC: eric225125
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: x86-64 (AMD64)   
OS: Linux (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments:
Description Flags
some tests none

Description Olivier Huber 2008-03-09 14:54:08 UTC
Created attachment 14985 [details]
some tests

I compared memory usage between nouveau and the blob : when I start with nouveau, it uses ~500M more than with the other. But I can't find where this memory is gone. No process in the userspace seems to have used it.
 When I kill X, I get my memory back. See the attachment for some figures.

videocard : 7800 GS AGP (256 Mo)
Kernel : 2.6.24-gentoo-r2
X: 1.4.0.90 plus some patches (I'm an gentoo user :  1.4.0.90-r3)
libdrm, x11-drm, mesa, nouveau from git (last build : 09/03/08 in the morning)
Comment 1 Olivier Huber 2008-03-15 04:26:46 UTC
I found that this memory was the AGP Aperture. I check my bios, and it was set to 512 Mo. So I set it to 128 and my memory usage has decrease (see attachment for details).

I have checked that this memory is seen by the kernel as used by creating a big file in ram : 
dd if=dev/zero of =/var/tmp/portage/test bs=400M and it begins to swap. (/var/tmp/portage/ is mount in tmpfs)

Comment 2 Eric Smith 2008-07-03 09:49:40 UTC
I also have this problem with my 6800gt.  Is this the correct behaviour of AGP Aperture?   Isn't it supposed to only used memory as needed?
Comment 3 Stephane Marchesin 2008-07-17 16:10:10 UTC
Yes it's proper behaviour. You can map lots of memory, that doesn't always mean you're using it, or even that it's allocated.

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