Patience

Although it is obvious to anyone who has tried to use the open source drivers for the AMD R600-based devices, these Phoronix benchmarks show just how bad things are. And those tests were performed with the most absolute blending edge pre-release versions of all the software involved. In other words, it going to be a long, long time before any improvements show up in a release version. Patience, have you must.

Hiccups

I've developed a new problem with the Xvideo rendering system. The movie will jerk occasionally, usually during slow pans or tilts. The cause must at a low level as mplayer is not giving the usual, "Your system is too slow to play this," message.

I first noticed the problem with the final release of 2.6.37 but it exists in the -rc7 release as well, although the effect is a lot less frequent. I'm going to try the 2.6.36 kernel next. If the problem occurs there as well, I'll know that the cause is not the kernel, because 2.6.36 worked perfectly before.

Sigh. I'll be glad when the AMD graphics support stablizes a bit. It is improving but there are plenty of hiccups (literally, in this case) along the way.