[Solved] What the 'graphics-KERNEL' extension does? MC12-x86

[Santos]

Hi

I got a computer with 256MB of RAM, trying to optimize all I can. The BIOS is broken and the laptop behaves rather strangely when all RAM is filled up.

I was testing video playback, before I was thinking about the 'graphics-KERNEL' and the fact it could provide some "accelerated graphics" to the laptop by making use of the dedicated graphics. So before I always loaded up the extension right after the firmware; let's say: firmware-radeon.tcz.

So my thinking was to load first the firmware, to later load the graphics-KERNEL extension to guarantee maximum performance. But I found out that by just loading Xvesa and mplayer I could easily play 720p videos without stutter.

sudo mplayer -vo xvidix

sudo  is required because some 'sticky-bit' thing that doesn't let mplayer access the accelerated graphics part of the hardware. I remember reading this in a blog, plust it really works. Not using sudo makes video playback much worse.

The laptop I'm working on is very buggy, If the graphics-KERNEL extension is loaded it will always corrupt the LVDS graphics when an external monitor is attached but this will not happen when only Xvesa is loaded.

Every time I load graphics-KERNEL, it makes the framebuffer tty to properly recognize the screen resolution and adjust the tty to the correct LVDS size, instead of the default 800x600.

What exactly is the graphics-KERNEL extension?
Do I really need it for peak performance for video or any graphics related tasks?
What am I missing from not loading the extension when using Xvesa? (I don't load it because having loaded the graphics-KERNEL extension and Xvesa corrupts the framebuffer and I can't use the TTYs)

[Rich]

Hi Santos
To the best of my knowledge, graphics-KERNEL is for Xorg.
Xvesa definitely does not use it.
I see no reason for you to load it with your setup.

[Santos]

Thank you.

Besides, does it mean that loading graphics-KERNEL and Xorg will improve graphic performance (video playback)?

I'm asking for the other laptops that are more powerful than this one.

[Juanito]

As long as you have compatible hardware, loading the graphics-KERNEL and Xorg-7.7-3d extensions will allow graphics hardware acceleration taking some of the load off your cpu for graphics intensive applications.

Note that you should exit to the console prompt before loading graphics-KERNEL.

[CNK]

Also, for video playback specifically, the best reduction in CPU usage might require loading additional drivers for decoding video on the GPU. For Intel graphics video decoding via VAAPI, I needed to install intel-vaapi-driver.tcz and xf86-video-intel.tcz. My GPU was slower than my CPU at decoding video though.

[Santos]

For more capable hardware I tend to load:

firmware-HARDWARE
graphics-KERNEL
xf86-video-VENDOR

In that order and before most extensions, likely I load before that any wifi or locale extension related. After the essentials are loaded I continue with everything else: Xorg, jwm, screen, rxvt, alsa...

Post can be marked as solved, thank you all!

[Rich]

Hi Santos

... Post can be marked as solved ...

Done.