Re: System slowness and graphics-card

[Mike Pumford <mpumford%mudcovered.org.uk@localhost>]

On 07/04/2020 15:11, Todd Gruhn wrote:
> The system I am using was assembled and purchase back in Aug 2019.
>
> Some things I noticed:
>    1) The graphics card (nVidia GEFORCE GTX 1660)  needs to be booted using
>        boot -c ; disable nouveau; quit
Okay this means you are disabling the KMS driver which means no 
acceleration in X.
After a quick google this is a TU116 chip which isn't supported in 9.0 
stable. You might have to disable nouveau if you were running the 
original 9.0 release as the patch to auto disable came down the pipe 
after the release was cut.

>     2) When I compile a package -- and X Windows is NOT RUNNING -- this thing
>         flies
>     3) When I start X (using MWM) -- builds are extremely slow;
>         When I do "su root" checking the root passwd takes about 3 minutes
>  > Is there a connection between X, my graphics card, and system slowness?
Seems likely I'd guess X has no driver so is doing everything in 
software using the vesa driver. Without the nouveau kernel driver you 
can't use the new X driver and the old pre-KMS nv driver will also not 
support the card.
I do find it a bit surprisping that an X setup with mwm would be slow as 
thats a fairly lightweight window manager so even in vesa mode I'd 
expect any reasonable cpu to perform okay although that does depend on 
what you are doing in X. What things are you trying to run?


> Is there a way to fix this; or is it a matter of having support for my chip-set?
There isn't newer support even in current so you either need an older NV 
card or an older AMD card to get supported hardware. This may of course 
be limiting in other ways if you dual boot the system and play games. :(


Mike