I have an old laptop, where I have installed FreeBSD 14.3 with xfce4:
Lenovo Ideapad 305-15IBD 80NJ
Intel i5-5200U (4) @ 2.195GHz
GPU: INTEL HD Graphics 5500
Memory: 6 GB
When I try to watch videos, I realized that the CPU is running at 100% and in general it is very laggy when I try to resize windows etc. For example when I go from split screen to maximize screen, the window maximizes but the content takes 2-3 seconds to fit the new size!
I tried to load radeonkms or amdgpu on system startup, but apparently it won't even enter to the graphical space.
Any idea what should I check next? I tried to follow
prime configuration article, without any success.
Thank you very much for any help
I wished the Handbook had better guidance on configuring/troubleshooting iGPU+dGPU systems, because many high-end laptops have a combo like this (usually Intel i915 + NVidia or Intel i915 + AMD).
I recently installed 14.3-RELEASE on such a laptop (Dell Inspiron 7706 2n1, circa 2020), and to my surprise, it "mostly" just worked after I installed graphics/drm-kmod and x11/nvidia-driver
from ports (to make certain of a match between the kernel version and the built-modules).
I initially
thought acceleration wasn't working, because I didn't understand exactly what to expect, so I assumed I had to hardwire the xorg.conf for Driver "nvidia", but with Optimus Prime laptops like mine, it appears to use the integrated graphics as "primary", and does acceleration on the backend transparently. I didn't find any documentation about how to configure or verify that iGPU+dGPU was working the way the FreeBSD team intended, and trying to hard-configure Driver "nvidia" resulted in a black screen.
But after getting drm-kmod installed, I just let X start normally, and found OpenGL-accelerated apps were actually getting accelerated without having to configure xorg.conf specifically for NVidia.
I know iGPU+dGPU adds "complication", because different makes/models multiplex the display in different ways between the iGPU and the dGPU.
If you're not sure which kernel modules actually got loaded that support your GPU(s), you can run:
kldstat
then look for amdgpu, radeon, i915kms, and/or nvidia in the list. I don't have any systems with AMD, so I can't tell you exactly which modules will be loaded for AMD, but on my Intel+NVidia laptop, the relevant modules I see loaded include: i915kms, drm, nvidia-modeset, and nvidia.
If you're not certain if acceleration is available, you can run:
glxinfo
(if there is no OpenGL acceleration, I believe it will give a short error message, but if acceleration
is available, you'll usually see hundreds of lines of OpenGL info)
I also encountered a very odd problem on my Dell Inspiron 7706 (11th gen i7-1165G7 2.8GHz 4-core w/NVidia dGPU) -- I ran mpv to view a video which appeared to work well
for a while (ie seemed like good performance), but when I fullscreened -OR- when I hit "q" to exit while playing a 4K video, it went into CPU-burn mode for
several seconds (top showed "uwait") for the state, and mpv's UI was "unresponsive" during that time.
This problem turned-out to be that mpv uses the OpenMP library (a multiprocessing library apparently provided with clang) where the modern-default is where one CPU can do tight-polling of threads to look for other-thread completions, and as a result, I saw almost exactly 100% cpu burn according to top (with STATE of "uwait"). It took me a
lot of effort researching and experimenting to figure-out that I could just set the environment variable
KMP_LIBRARY=serial before starting mpv, then the OpenMP library saw that env variable and apparently stopped spin-polling, which greatly-reduced the amount of CPU-time mpv needed for full-screening and/or when I hit "q" to exit, mpv has behaved great since I preset KMP_LIBRARY as part of starting mpv. For me, setting
KMP_LIBRARY=serial did not negatively mpv's performance in any other way that I could notice.
The
KMP_LIBRARY environment variable may not fix your problem, but it's easy/quick to try, so shot in the dark here..
I recommend
not setting the
KMP_LIBRARY environment variable to "serial"
as your global-default for all programs in your home-login environment, because there may be other applications that behave unfavorably with that particular setting (apparently a bunch of packages use OpenMP).
If you are still experiencing problems after reading and/or trying the various comments in this thread, please let us know your
kldstat output and which video player you are running, that additional info might help us zero-in better on your particular problem.
Hope this helps,
