Bug 30375

I didn't find anything sticking out that could influence graphics that way when I did look at Firefox/Mozilla code logs, and I didn't see that happening myself even though I'm using state-of-the-art Mozilla code as part of my work daily, and I'm using nouveau as well.

Are you sure it's not something like Flash, which accesses graphics directly?

Of course, with Firefox adding hardware acceleration capabilities recently, our Mozilla code could trigger nouveau bugs more easily - but from what I see on my machine, Mozilla doesn't actually enable hardware-accelerated windows (i.e. compositing) with nouveau right now. Check the bottom of about:support in Firefox, it probably will tell you that 0/x windows are accelerated.

On 09/26/2010 01:59 PM, bugzilla-daemon@freedesktop.org wrote:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30375
>
> --- Comment #1 from Robert Kaiser<kairo@kairo.at>  2010-09-26 13:59:24 PDT ---

> Are you sure it's not something like Flash, which accesses graphics directly?

Excellent clue, thanks.  The problem was not a plugin, but rather an add-on :-/

When I download and run the nightly builds from mozilla I never install any
plugins for my brief tests -- but just now when I looked at about:plugins I
noticed an add-on that I'd installed for converting video formats in real time.

The bit that confused me is that the add-on was installed in my ~/.mozilla
directory instead of the firefox/plugins directory, so it was still messing
things up even when running the nightly builds "with no plugins".

The probability of encountering mysterious screw-ups gets closer to 1 with
every passing day :)

Oh dear, I spoke much too soon.  I just discovered that the bug disappeared only because I forgot to change xorg.conf from nv back to nouveau :-(

Now that I really *am* using nouveau, the CPU is still pegged at 99% by Xorg when viewing the npr.org website with the latest nightly build of firefox.

One new observation that I didn't notice earlier is that minimizing the firefox window completely eliminates the cpu overload.

When I restore the firefox window, the cpu overload resumes exactly as before.
I hope this may give you some clue about the cause of the problem.

Again, I've looked closely at my amd64 builds of firefox and nouveau-related packages and there is no sign of this cpu overload problem.  Just on i686.

I'd be more than happy to build profiling versions of X/nouveau if such versions exist, but I'll need some hints to get started.

Many thanks.

(In reply to comment #3)
 
> Again, I've looked closely at my amd64 builds of firefox and nouveau-related
> packages and there is no sign of this cpu overload problem.  Just on i686.

Another big difference between the two machines is that the i686 has NV34 hardware while the amd64 has NV4x.

It appears that this bug report has laid dormant for quite a while. Sorry we haven't gotten to it. Since we fix bugs all the time, chances are pretty good that your issue has been fixed with the latest software. Please give it a shot. (Linux kernel 3.10.7, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.9, mesa 9.1.6, or their git versions.) If upgrading to the latest isn't an option for you, your distro's bugzilla is probably the right destination for your bug report.

In an effort to clean up our bug list, we're pre-emptively closing all bugs that haven't seen updates since 2011. If the original issue remains, please make sure to provide fresh info, see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/ for what we need to see, and re-open this one.

Thanks,

The Nouveau Team