NVIDIA driver slows X and KDE start

user · April 19, 2011, 6:39pm

Hello. I have recently installed openSUSE 11.4 x86_64 on my laptop, with
NVIDIA driver (260.19.44,Geforce 9300M GS).Performance is good, but it slows
the boot process: The NVidia logo appears and stays on the screen for 10
seconds aproximately.KDE start is very slow also. I have tried to fix it by
adding nomodeset to menu.lst and settting sysconfig variable
NO_KMS_IN_INITRD to yes,with no success.
Thank you in advance.

Alberto García Baladía

bsilvereagle · April 19, 2011, 10:53pm

In the “Devices” section of either your xorg.conf or the file in xorg.conf.d that contains the “Devices” section add the line

"Option"      "NoLogo"   "true"

That will prevent the logo from showing, but I’m not sure if it will improve performance. I believe it is worth a shot though.

user · April 20, 2011, 1:42pm

Thank you for the suggestion, but the problem is still here.With the NoLogo
option I have 10 seconds of blank screen, an KDE is still starting very
slow…

–
Alberto García Baladía

gogalthorp · April 20, 2011, 5:19pm

Once started does it run OK? How much memory on the lappy?

user · April 20, 2011, 6:12pm

Once started it runs perfectly;system RAM is 4 GB and GPU’s 256 MB.

–
Alberto García Baladía

martin_helm · April 20, 2011, 6:20pm

Alberto García Baladía wrote:

> Once started it runs perfectly;system RAM is 4 GB and GPU’s 256 MB.
>
Can you check if /var/log/Xorg.0.log contains some errors (of course it can
be anything else and not only the xserver, but let’s look at that first).

user · April 20, 2011, 6:51pm

Only one error:

26.084] (EE) Logitech USB Receiver: failed to initialize for relative
axes.
26.084] (II) Logitech USB Receiver: initialized for absolute axes.

But the mouse is OK.

–
Alberto García Baladía

martin_helm · April 20, 2011, 11:31pm

Alberto García Baladía wrote:

> Only one error:
>
> 26.084] (EE) Logitech USB Receiver: failed to initialize for relative
> axes.
> 26.084] (II) Logitech USB Receiver: initialized for absolute axes.
>
> But the mouse is OK.
>
Sorry for the late follow up. No this is not really related it just tells
you that it checked your Logitech device and the first setting it ries fails
and so it uses the second one which works.

Before we trvael through all the log files. I should have asked that
earlier: What happens if you simply boot from grub into the failsafe mode,
is that also slow or is that faster?

tsu2 · April 21, 2011, 2:23am

I’d be surprised if loading the video driver is the actual culprit.
If you’ve installed the latest nVidia package, it also includes the nVidia Configuration Tool which IMO is more likely to require resources and can of course only be loaded when the display driver is already fully loaded.

Take a look at it, in KDE (prob similar in Gnome)
KDE App button > system > configuration > Configure nVidia X Server Settings

(You should also see an optional Dock applet which places an icon in the Tray)

From within this application, you’ll see that it touches <many> subsystems gathering plenty of hardware information, it doesn’t just edit the X Server config file.

I suppose you could disable loading the app on bootup but I wouldn’t… The benefit of the app far out-weighs the bootup penalty.

IMO,
Tony

colao · April 21, 2011, 7:05am

Post the result of


cat /proc/cpuinfo
cat /proc/meminfo

user · April 21, 2011, 1:09pm

Well, finally I fixed the problem, at least partially, in a “trial and
error” way; I set again the sysconfig variable NO_KMS_IN_INITRD to the
default value,leaving nomodeset unchanged in menu.lst. Now the NVidia Logo
stays only one second aproximately on the screen, but KDE is still a little
slow starting.
Thank you for all your suggestions.

–
Alberto García Baladía