Solved Slow (!) blender on Thinkpad X1 Yoga Gen2 - any help?

Hi all,

the last days I tried to get blender into working state on a 2nd gen Thinkpad X1
Yoga.

tl;dr

blender is stuttering and jerky on my X1 running an I7-8550U / UHD620 (4-core,
2/4Ghz) and FreeBSD, while it works like a charm on my Surface Go Pentium Gold
4415Y/HD615 (2-core, 1.6Ghz) with Ubuntu.
This is both on 12-STABLE and -CURRENT. It’s a bit better on -CURRENT, but still
horrible.

Is there any way to speed blender up on FreeBSD?

dmesg https://pastebin.com/RGA3VLiB
xorg.log https://pastebin.com/8C49UGKk
glxinfo https://pastebin.com/Qnw03VSc

Long version:
I wanted to try out blenders Grease Pencil, up until now I only used blender for
video editing.

GP or rotating 3D-Scenes in blender 2.90 on 12-STABLE was abysmally slow and
crashed repeatedly after a few strokes with grease pencil or a few minutes work
in the 3D-view with:

Code:
Jan  4 23:04:17 Danton kernel: drmn0: GPU HANG: ecode 9:1:0x87f99eb9, in blender
[100824], hang on rcs0
Jan  4 23:04:17 Danton kernel: drmn0: Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0

The GPU reset did not work, machine hangs, reboot via ssh.

Recompiled blender, tried older version, all with the same result, although 2.8x
seemed a bit faster, but still slow & crashes.

Searched the web, found similar problems by others on Linux, suggested KMS
update.

So I switched to -CURRENT with drm-current-kmod (5.4 instead of 4.5)

Same GPU hang, but here the reset works. Performance *slightly* better, but
every hang takes about 2 sec, no way to work with this.

Updating X1 bios - now the error did not happen for quite some time.

But still, quite slow. Stuttering when rotating the default cube in simple solid
or wireframe mode. On a I7-8550U running full speed (hwpstate_intel with
epp=0), cpu freq between 2500 and 3900).

Installed mesa-devel:the GPU hang is back.

Recompiled blender to 2.91.0_2, mesa-devel, drm everything. No more GPU hang for
now, but still stuttering motions, Grease Pencil strokes hang back 1-2 seconds
from my stylus.

Then I tried my 1st gen Surface Go 8Gb running Ubuntu: Blender is blazing fast
for these simple tasks. Fluid rotation, allmost real time grease pencil:WTF?

This is an i7-8550U quad core running 2/4Ghz with an UHD620 GPU against a
Pentium Gold, and the Pentium wins hands down?

I would really *love* to get blender up even only to Pentium speed. Blender with
simple models in solid mode should *fly* on my X1, same with a few Grease Pencil
strokes…


Any ideas, help, suggestion?

Thanks, Mathias
 
Does it work like a charm on Surface Go with FreeBSD?

Does it Ubuntu stutter and jerk on the X1?
It flies with Ubuntu on the X1, yes.

Just tried it with a live CD, the demo Race Spaceship https://download.blender.org/demo/eevee/race_spaceship/race_spaceship.blend can be rotate in real time in material mode, and is only very slightly lagging in rendered mode.

On FreeBSD that spaceship rotates about as slow as the default cube. So it does not seem to be dependent on the complexity of the scene.

Any ideas where to look?
 
Ok, blender is as fast as I want when I run either as

vblank_mode=0 blender
or
LIBGL_DRI3_DISABLE=1 blender

I'm not yet sure about the connection between both, i.e. is ist DRM2 vs DRM3, or vblank_mode while in DRM3 (is that possible?), but for now I'm happy ;)
 
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