Re: [9front] Question re: RPI video performance

[Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net>]

which pi do you have, the ancient ones can be slow but 3b and 4 have been fine for me.

it is true that plan9 doesnt make very much use of the gpu, but it  use it. comparing to x11 or wayland, plan9 is probably never going to be as fast.

> On 3 Dec 2022, at 11:14, Nicola Girardi <ng@0x80.stream> wrote:
> 
> Steve Simon <steve@quintile.net> wrote:
>> you are sure it is video performance that is slow and not something else?
> 
> In fact, I'm not sure at all.
> 
> OTOH, I'm aware that screen updates can become very slow when the
> system is under load, but that's understandable.  If I load a page in
> mothra, say, the mouse becomes much less responsive until the page is
> fully loaded.  But the slow screen updates also happen when the system
> is idle (I mostly only do text editing).
> 
>> try cat /sys/lib/words (rusty memory, probably the wrong path).
>> 
>> you could also try the trusty catclock.
> 
> I'm not sure I understand your test; you're proposing to run programs
> that don't do much other than updating the screen; if they run fast,
> the video performance is good enough and the slowness I'm observing is
> due to something else.  Is that right?
> 
> Catclock runs smoothly, but admittedly only updates a small part of
> the screen.  Cat'ing a large file (in a window with scroll enabled) is
> indeed slow.  Unhiding a rio window is slow to redraw, even if it's
> just a window running rc where I previosly cat'ed a file.
> 
>> i have never used 9front on the pi but miller’s distro was fine, and the video driver is probably the same…
> 
> I'd try that for comparison but I'm not sure I have a spare sd card,
> I'll check.
>