I was going all over the place trying to fix a major problem. Flash in full screen on just 360p was super sluggish (like a really poor slideshow) and it would nearly freeze the system, plus the video controls were unresponsive. This was under a fully updated openSUSE 11.4 system for a new laptop using the i915 Intel driver.
Out of curiosity, I decided to see how it would perform with another distro. I booted from a Fedora 16 live CD, and I could play full screen Flash at even 720p smoothly, and the controls were very responsive.
Odd.
So I booted from an openSUSE 12.1 RC live CD. However, full screen Flash was extremely choppy, just like on 11.4! I tried all combinations of xorg.conf.d options and extensions. Nothing made a difference.
Fedora 16:
Flash: 11.1
Smoothly plays full screen at 720p; controls are responsive
openSUSE 11.4:
Flash 11.1
Chokes and nearly freezes the system at only 360p in full screen; controls are unresponsive
openSUSE 12.1:
Flash 11.1
Chokes and nearly freezes the system at only 360p in full screen; controls are unresponsive
After nearly giving up on trying to change driver options and messing with X.org, I reverted everything on the openSUSE 11.4 back to the defaults. Then I changed one thing, out of curiousity:
I removed the vga=0x317 from the boot options, rebooted, and like magic I can play full screen Flash in 720p smoothly with responsive controls, just like on Fedora 16! Another thing I noticed is that Firefox’s tab animations, among other UI elements, were also smoother now.
My question is, since I’m not a technical guy: Why does this make a difference? I noticed I lost the fancy boot splash, but what else is affected? Is it possible to keep the boot splash without losing the benefits of smoother video playback? All I know is that it has something to do with the framebuffer resolution. Why would that matter after I login to an X session?
If openSUSE uses this boot option by default, it could potentionally cause a new user to leave out of frustration. I’ve been using openSUSE since 11.0, and I was nearly ready to give up. A new user would not have taken nearly as much time as I did in order to find a solution.
If I use “nomodeset”, then regardless of whether or not I use vga=0x317, Flash will perform better than the default boot options, but not as well as when I removed vga=0x317 and did not add “nomodeset”. Confusing, huh? I noticed that the only way to get a boot splash is to use “vga=something”, because without, even with “splash=silent”, I see only text.
In short:
Removing “vga=” gives me: No boot splash; Best Flash performance
Using “nomodeset” gives me: Boot splash (unless I remove “vga=”); Adequate Flash performance
This sounds like a kernel mode setting (KMS) issue that would probably need a bug report to openSUSE’s Bugzilla. In some circumstances (I don’t recall previous hardware affected - you would need to search the forum or google), the vga parameter has caused problems for KMS and removing it has been a workaround.
You can confirm which graphics driver is loaded and utilized by inspecting the log file /var/log/Xorg.0.log that is rewritten on each startup of X or reboot. The driver’s name appears on the left side of each log entry.
When you boot with “nomodeset”, KMS is disabled. The “intel” driver (i915 is the kernel module) only works with KMS, so in this case a basic graphics driver called “fbdev” will be used by xorg, giving inferior performance and limited resolution (probably 1024x768). You probably noticed that, and the use of “vga=” won’t adversely affect it. Again, look for “FBDEV” in the appropriate Xorg.0.log for that test.
Another option is to load the old “intellegacy” driver by configuring the appropriate file in xorg.conf.d, but it’s unlikely to support your newer graphics chipset (Sandybridge?).
Unfortunately, the laptop is not in my possesion anymore, since I was initially setting it up for someone else. He doesn’t mind the white-on-black text boot, so at least in this case it was acceptable. The best I can do for a bug report is essentially what I already mentioned here, but I would not be able to follow through, since I don’t have the laptop with me.
I believe version 2.9.1 was the last intel driver to support non-KMS. Whenever I booted with “nomodeset” on this laptop, the resolution was 1024x768, yet full screen Flash ironically peformed better than without “nomodeset” (using vga=0x317). “Fbdev” performing better than “intel”? I had tried using the intellegacy driver during my back and forth tests, and the system would not start X. Like you mentioned, the chipset is too new for intellegacy. Yes, it is Sandybridge.
I will also mention one more thing I remembered. With the default (vga=0x317 without nomodeset), switching between TTYs was slow to draw the screen. I could feel a bit of a lag. Upon removing vga=0x317 (still, without nomodeset), switching between TTYs was quick and snappy.
Yes, “intellegacy” is that 2.9.1 driver and is non-KMS. “Fbdev” better than “intel”? Yes because “intel”/KMS support for that laptop’s chipset is either broken or not there! Unfortunately, from your testing, 12.1 doesn’t appear to offer a solution either.
BTW, my somewhat older intel GM45 chipset is properly supported by “intel”/KMS on both 11.4 and Tumbleweed. The “vga=” boot option is present here [by default] without problems.
Just for acuaracy
I wasn’t aware that either Fedora or openSUSE have Flash in the LiveCD, which is how this reads.
What are we to conclude then, that you put flash in place manually?
Yes. Adobe’s web site has the latest version (11.1) of Flash in .tar.gz format. You simply extract it into ~/.mozilla/plugins/
But I believe the performance of Flash was just a symptom of a larger problem, since I noticed other things performed better upon removing vga=0x317, such as UI elements and animations, switching TTYs, and less CPU usage by Xorg (quieter fans too.) So I think full screen Flash just made it really obvious that a larger underlying problem was occuring. If one scenario chokes at full screen 360p and the other scenario smoothly plays full screen 720p, then I couldn’t ignore that something was drastically different.
This week-end i upgraded my Opensuse 11.4 to the lastest 12.1
And i also noticed a considerable downgrade in display performances after the upgrade. The most noticeable was using plasma widgets like networkmanager or simply the menu. The widgets popped-up slowly (black screen section for on or two second before displaying the widget), and browsing (in the widgets) was also slow. Opening new windows and browsing in dolphin also showed these kind of slowness.
My graphic card is also an intel : Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960
So i’ve just tried your trick, and indeed everything is much more smooth now.
One thing is different in my case : since the update i don’t have any bootsplash screen, only black screen before kde splash. Removing the vga setting doesn’t help.
It’s not different than what happened with me, I also lost the graphical boot splash, which I mentioned in the first post:
Removing “vga=XXX” is the reason we lost the boot splash, but it’s a small price to pay (my opinion) for better overall performance. I believe Fedora and Ubuntu use Plymouth for a graphical splash, but it only works best with open source video drivers and KMS (kernel modeset). If you want to see more text, you can try removing the “quiet” option.
It is good news that this workaround has been found to work for some Intel graphics hardware, but as consused has already mentioned, a bug report should still be submitted, because this is a regression of the intel driver.
OpenSUSE 12.1 user here, stumbled across this thread.
I wanted to add my two cents, because removing the vga option from GRUB has drastically increased video performance for my entire setup. Flash performance is still not where it was in 11.4 (I’ve read another thread that Adobe has disabled hardware acceleration all together for Flash Player 11) but I can say that everything about my video appears to be super smooth. Even the mouse cursor looks and feels just a little bit different.
Apart from Flash (and frequently ~ 10% xorg cpu usage) I didn’t think I had much trouble at all with video in 12.1, but now I can clearly see a difference.
VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02) (On a ThinkPad T410s)
These posts were remarkably helpful. I tried all variations described in the earlier posts and removing the vga= parameter from boot improved flash performance tremendously.
My video card is VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03).
From another Google find, I have also created the following file and inserted a single line. This also seemed to improve flash performance. With all these changes, my linux flash performance is finally better than my Windows7 flash performance (which makes a big difference watching live sports videos on espn3).
Just for accuracy