Release Found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
With many NVidia cards, when using a proprietary driver, xorg seems to freeze with high cpu usage. To fix this issue, add the below option to /etc/X11/xorg.conf under the Device section.
Option "UseEvents" "on"
Below shows how this change will look under the Device section.
Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BoardName "GeForce FX 5200"
Option "RenderAccel" "on"
Option "UseEvents" "on"
EndSection
Red Hat’s customer service and support teams receive technical support questions from users all over the world. Red Hat technicians add the questions and answers to Red Hat Knowledgebase on a daily basis. Access to Red Hat Knowledgebase is free. Every month, Red Hat Magazine offers a preview into the Red Hat Knowledgebase by highlighting some of the most recent entries. The information provided in this article is for your information only. The origin of this information may be internal or external to Red Hat. While Red Hat attempts to verify the validity of this information before it is posted, Red Hat makes no express or implied claims to its validity.
This entry was posted by the editorial team
on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 7:59 am and is filed under tips and tricks.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 20th, 2007 at 11:16 pm
In case folk are wondering what UseEvent does, the Nvidia docs say:
Option “UseEvents” “boolean”
Enables the use of system events in some cases when the X driver is waiting for the hardware. The X driver can briefly spin through a tight loop when waiting for the hardware. With this option the X driver instead sets an event handler and waits for the hardware through the ‘poll()’ system call. Default: the use of the events is disabled.
This goes from using a “busy” wait by default to a less CPU intensive system call:
poll, ppoll - wait for some event on a file descriptor
However, this can cause problems on some hardware so if X starts getting flaky and crashing, set UseEvents back to false.
January 13th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Great tip! Took my Xorg cpu usage from 90% down to 20% while playing high def video in VLC.
Thanks!
March 22nd, 2008 at 4:13 pm
thanks!gr8 tip!