005.txt - gopherhole - My gopherhole source code.
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       005.txt (3471B)
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            1 [jay.scot]
            2 [005]
            3 
            4 
            5 --[ Why I dropped freebsd after a month
            6 
            7 
            8 I switched over to using FreeBSD as my main desktop around 1 month ago.
            9 Last night I had enough of some core issues I was having and ended up
           10 switching back to Linux. My 2-year-old graphics card, an AMD RX 5700XT,
           11 does not work with the current stable release 12.2, so I had no choice
           12 but to use -CURRENT, ALPHA-2 then BETA-1.
           13 
           14 
           15 My setup is minimal; I don't use any GUI applications apart from the
           16 rare occasion I need to use a browser; I do use mpv often. Even with
           17 this setup, there was a performance issue that caused Xorg to micro
           18 stutter, causing a system pause for around 1 second.
           19 
           20 
           21 When using just a console things seemed to work fine, so my first
           22 thought was the problem must lie with Xorg. Over a few days I tried
           23 tweaking various Xorg options such as Tearfree, SWCursor, etc. This made
           24 zero improvement, my next port of call was the AMDGPU driver, drm-kmod.
           25 
           26 
           27 AMDGPU, A trip to the GitHub project page for this project did indeed
           28 show 4 out of 17 issues open are for the exact model of graphics card
           29 I have.  Though none of the issues seemed related to the problem I was
           30 having.
           31 
           32 
           33 During my research, though, I also found posts on /r/freebsd and the
           34 official FreeBSD forums with similar issues, Sadly, none of them had any
           35 actual solutions. I decided to build the kernel module from the latest
           36 git master, this seemed to improve the stuttering, progress!
           37 
           38 
           39 Around this time I also found out that -CURRENT, -ALPHA and -BETA builds
           40 have a lot of debugging enabled in the kernel by default, which can
           41 cause degraded system performance.
           42 
           43 
           44 I found GENERIC-NODEBUG kernel config; I stripped out a lot of modules
           45 I wouldn't need to help the build times. This was so simple to do, and
           46 before I knew it I had a custom kernel built with all debugging removed.
           47 Booting into the new kernel I noticed an improvement right away.
           48 
           49 
           50 Playing a video still caused a little stuttering, as long as I did
           51 little else. I was happy with this for the time being, thinking that
           52 maybe when BETA-1 or RC came around things would be better.
           53 
           54 
           55 Woo-hoo, BETA-1 snapshot was released, time to give it a whirl.  BAM,
           56 right back to square one. So I went through the same steps again with
           57 building the AMDGPU module from git and building a custom kernel with no
           58 debugging enabled.
           59 
           60 
           61 The same day as BETA-1 released, I got a reply on one post I made about
           62 the issue. Just run this, the poster says, All processes are tied to the
           63 first CCX0. This will reduce the usable cores to 4, however.
           64 
           65 
           66         sh -c 'ps -aux | cut -w -f2 | xargs -I foo \
           67         cpuset -l 0,2,4,6 -p foo > /dev/null 2>&1'
           68 
           69 
           70 No way this can be the solution, can it? Well yes it was, suddenly I had
           71 nearly ZERO issues. All the lag had disappeared! The only cost? I had
           72 to gimp the potential of my system.
           73 
           74 
           75 At this point I had enough, I spent so long on such a trivial matter
           76 I decided just to go back to Linux until 13.0 is released, then I will
           77 revisit it. I liked FreeBSD. There is so much to it that I loved and
           78 would go back in a heartbeat if I could get my hardware working without
           79 having to jump over so many hurdles.
           80 
           81 
           82 * I love ports
           83 * I had set up Bhyve running Poudriere building my own packages.
           84 * Setting up the GPU driver was really simple (if it worked on my card)
           85 * Audio setup was such a breeze.
           86 * I had no issue installing ports/packages I needed, pkg is a wonderful tool.
           87 * Jails are so handy, I didn't think I would need them but man they are
           88 great!
           89 
           90 
           91 .EOF