[CentOS] Clunky Xorg with latest 6.7 upgrade?

Mon Aug 17 19:04:50 UTC 2015
Bill Maltby (C4B) <centos4bill at gmail.com>

On Mon, 2015-08-17 at 11:14 -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> What video card are you using?  Xorg driver or proprietary binary thing?
lspci shows 

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
[AMD/ATI] Cedar [Radeon HD 5000/6000/7350/8350 Series]

lsmod shows
radeon               1734542  4

I believe this latter is the Xorg provided since I'm trying hard to just
be a user since I exited the biz many years ago when I kept up with
everything.

The /var/log/Xorg.0.log shows, among other things...
[    82.374] (==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout
[    82.374] (II) LoadModule: "ati"
[    82.377] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/ati_drv.so
[    82.550] (II) Module ati: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[    82.550]    compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 7.5.99
[    82.550]    Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[    82.550]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 15.0
[    82.550] (II) LoadModule: "radeon"
[    82.550] (II) Loading /usr/lib64/xorg/modules/drivers/radeon_drv.so
[    82.603] (II) Module radeon: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
[    82.603]    compiled for 1.15.0, module version = 7.5.99
[    82.603]    Module class: X.Org Video Driver
[    82.603]    ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 15.0

> 
> The next thing I'd do is boot the last kernel under which you saw 
> "normal" performance.  If booting the older kernel doesn't fix the 
> problem, then the problem is probably the X11 server.  At that point, 
> I'd start using "yum downgrade" to revert individual components, and 
> reboot until you find the change that fixes performance.  
> xorg-x11-server-Xorg and xorg-x11-drv-<something> are the ones I'd check 
> first.

There was a time I had the time, interest and expertise to do all that.
I actually thought it was fun and worthwhile.

I've successfully transitioned to a TDU (Typical Dump User) now though
and try to limit how much of my resources I devote to debugging issues
caused by ... Well never mind as a list of pejorative terms related to
how things are done these days seems inappropriate considering the
development model used.

But I do thank you for both the suggestions and taking the time to help
me get this far along. Tonight I may see some benefit from the disabling
of java in libreoffice, and if so that will have been a very big help.

The Ksnapshot lagging and jerky region selection won't be as big an
issue as it would have been six months or further back when I had to
occasionally select very quickly very large regions on a "largeish"
hi-res display when stuff was flying by very, very quickly.

My only next project is to get the new upstart .override working right
to try and start gdm and gdm-binary on tty7 instead of tty1 so that
telinit will work the way "God" intended instead of they way it doesn't
now.

Last time I tried the .override I apparently didn't get it right as it
didn't work. But I had read slap-dash and only partially so I know I
should be able to get better results with a little more care.

Bill