Ballmerpeak devblog

Software development, related stuff and others

Debugging HyperZ and fixing a radeon drm linux kernel module

June 19, 2019 — Richárd Thier

It was only a few days ago I have finished debugging a really heavy bug making as big of a mesa performance hit in the userland radeon driver that it became a news article on Phoronix. Back then while still on the heavy journey for getting my performance back I saw HyperZ was also not enabled for me, but if I enable it I gain 10-15% more performance - and an unplayable 3D screen.

On the original blog post I have also written about how to troubleshoot a performance issue generally, but what to do if you know about a performance increasing functionality - just you see it destroys the 3D picture?

Read on if you are interested in linux graphics internals once again ;-)

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Tags: drm, hyperz, r300, radeon, linux, kernel, mesa, arch, 32bit, linux, debug, glitches, fix, contribute, open-source, graphics, stack, analysis, 3D, optimization, tutorial, system, internals, hackerman, opengl, zbuffer, hiz, zmask, documentation

Debugging mesa and the linux 3D graphics stack

June 11, 2019 — Richárd Thier

Have you ever wanted to troubleshoot or even contribute to the linux graphics stack? Were you ever interested in doing a deep dive? Read on if you dare, but do not fear - I was rookie on the topic myself before I went for my hunt on a 50-1000% slowdown after some updates and a distro change.

I wanted to document the process of delving deep into open source drivers. I just wanted to put things together as it might be valuable for others wanting to do similar things - I was and still is a rookie for these things after all.

The power of open source: We can fix a more than decade old hardware getting a slowdown as easily as a new one! Fuck you planned obsolesence haha!

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Tags: mesa, arch, 32bit, linux, debug, slowdown, contribute, open-source, graphics, stack, analysis, 3D, optimization, tutorial, system, internals