A couple of weeks ago I purchased Borderlands, but only recently I found some time to install and run it. The hours that followed were a frustrating journey into performance issues, bad port quality and a first-hand experience on how having consoles as a primary market, in the end, backfires on us all.

A couple of weeks ago, I reported about a fix for Intel driver performance regression in Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). The fix solved the overal responsiveness of the interface (especially for composite-enabled desktops), but introduced a new problem which wasn’t visible at first: a memory leak slowly filling up swap space.

Over the course of 2 or 3 hours, my UXA-enabled driver would start to fill swap space with unrecoverable junk blocks. The only solution was to restart X before it grinded to a halt. This was not optimal, but I preferred restarting X over the clunky EXA method.

I’ve experimented with a new solution – read more behind the cut.

After upgrading from Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty (9.04) I noticed a noticeable performance hit, in 2d and 3d applications on my Ubuntu system, running a (rather crappy) Intel 945GM mobile graphics chip. After poking around on the Ubuntu forums I found this thread. The problem seems to be the switch between EXA and UXA in the new intel driver.

More tech talk and a solution behind the cut.