Tad's IT Blog
Ubuntu: Performance Issues
Ubuntu 9.04 with Windows 7 Loaded in a VirtualBox
Unfortunately, after my super-rosy post yesterday on how easy it was to install Ubuntu drivers and get my ATI Radeon HD 3200 up and running with Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve unfortunately run into a number of graphics & general performance issues and other various funky issues that I’m still having to investigate.
While I’m sure that I’ll reach some more conclusions on this, hopefully someone else has run into same, and can assist me. They’re not show-stoppers, but are pretty annoying.
- Catalyst Control Center: After my first reboot after I triumphantly installed Ubuntu and the factory drivers from AMD, I have not again been able to get in to the AMD Catalyst Control Center — in either user-mode or root-mode. Tailing /var/log/messages, I get the following:
Jun 14 20:28:21 turbotad kernel: [35343.066031] amdcccle[13174] general protection ip:a48c4be sp:bfc8be88 error:0Not sure what that means, but I simultaneously lost the ability to do Google Earth in 3D. Hm.
- Google Earth: After one successful load and then reboot, Google Earth refuses to respect that I have a 3D driver loaded. It just says that it’s now going to start in emulation mode, and of course then performs terribly as it’s only using the CPU. Not sure what happened. Compiz still works just fine (albeit much slower than when I was running Fedora 10)
- Firefox is sluggish – very sluggish: It feels like everthing I’m doing in Firefox (including typing this blog post) is attached to a spoon in cold honey. Typing has a lag to it, Flash and JS performance is slow, and it gets REAL slow as you have a couple of tabs open. My laptop has 4GB RAM so I’m not RAM-hobbled, and while a Turion RM-72 is nothing to write home about in terms of speed, the box is significantly more responsive in Windows Vista. Which is horrible.
- Slowest VirtualBox Performance I’ve Seen: Despite other issues I was having with graphics drivers, I was able to get VirtualBox up and running on Fedora 10 and Fedora 11, and after loading up a VM on Windows 7, I was able to easily work in the VM in full-screen, just like it was a single-core host computer. But now, on Ubuntu, for some odd reason, I can barely even control the mouse, it is so sluggish. So, that’s another one I have to investigate.
Anyhow, no idea how many of these issues have an easy resolution, but I figured I’d at least post it so that I could start with the process.
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I never thought I’d be switching to Ubuntu — but I can’t believe how painless this Ubuntu 9.04 install just was. After years on RPM-based distros, I was stymied just now, trying to get Linux back up and running on my HP Pavilion dv7 laptop, running in to all sorts of dorky installation issues that
about 1 year ago
thanks for sharing …
about 1 year ago
You should never use ATi cards on Linux machines. Go with NVIDIA and your problems are gone…
about 1 year ago
Joppe –
Thanks, though there are two issues with what you’ve said:
A) My computer has an integrated ATI Radeon 3200 controller, which is a part of my chipset in my laptop. Replacing that = getting a new laptop, which is not a practical way to solve a driver issue.
B) Further, ATI currently ships approximately 30% of the graphics controllers used in computers today, with Intel and nVidia making up the rest. So, embracing a strategy of avoiding ATI graphics controllers is cutting out a massive section of the market.
And as a further note, if ATI controllers were woefully inferior to all Intel and nVidia parts, one could make a point of not wanting to support something that is “bad because of suck”. However, ATI integrated 3D controllers are among the best out there in the value notebook segment as well as the high-end gaming segment, and as such it’s a bit daft to avoid making proper drivers to support them.
about 1 year ago
I've got a HP Pavillion laptop too, and the same problems that you have on ubuntu. Firefox is very sluggish, by the way. Did you find a solution, or another distro that runs better than ubuntu on that hardware? Or is it just an ATI driver problem? if so, please e-mail me! Thank you
about 1 year ago
Thiago –
Thanks for writing. No, I haven't found anything that's made Firefox faster on Ubuntu. I installed the Chrome alpha build on it, and that is actually significantly faster (much much faster, actually) but at Chrome's current state of development on Linux, there is no plugin support so no Flash. So, unless you stay only on Facebook and such, it's not all that useful.
In terms of other distros, OpenSuse and Fedora both perform real fast and don't have the same sticky lagginess in Firefox, but unfortunately all I read these days is that fglrx just doesn't jive with xorg 1.6 and so if you have an ATI board and want to go Fedora, you're a bit screwed for the moment. I really hope that changes, though.