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)
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)
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?
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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