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. Continue reading »