Memory leak on intelchips when desktopeffects (KDE4) are enabled

[Stone Dragon]

This is reproducable, an I'll open a bug, if I'm not the only one having this:

Thinkpad X61s with intel graphics chip (GM965/GL960):
If desktop effects under KDE4 are enabled, it takes 1-5 minutes until the whole memory and the whole swap are gone. The mystery: There is no identifiable process or kernel thread in top who is doing this. It just uses up all virtual memory until the kernel starts to kill processes in emergency (using the oom-score) and finally freezes practically.

Solution: Disable desktop-effects.

Can anyone else confirm this?

Regards

Chris

[Jim Rockford]

This is reproducable, an I'll open a bug, if I'm not the only one having this:

Thinkpad X61s with intel graphics chip (GM965/GL960):
If desktop effects under KDE4 are enabled, it takes 1-5 minutes until the whole memory and the whole swap are gone. The mystery: There is no identifiable process or kernel thread in top who is doing this. It just uses up all virtual memory until the kernel starts to kill processes in emergency (using the oom-score) and finally freezes practically.

Solution: Disable desktop-effects.

Can anyone else confirm this?

Regards

Chris

Chris -- I can confirm that when I enabled "desktop effects" my screen suddenly went blank, never to return. I only gave it 3 or 4 minutes before I rebooted, so my system never froze up like you describe (and I'm using a desktop with Intel dual core 2 chip). In any case, desktop effects enabling totally screwed things up. I have an Nvidia type (BFG) GeForce 9600 GT video card.

What I'd like to know is how I can disable desktop effects from a command shell.

Thanks,
Jim

[Stone Dragon]

You need to edit .kde/share/config/kwinrc and set:
[Compositing]
Enabled=true

to
[Compositing]
Enabled=false

restart KDE and that's it.

[newtrack4]

Disabling compositing seems to have fixed my Lenovo Y530 laptop with an Intel Graphics chipset. It no longer freezes after about 10 minutes, I think it takes longer for me to freeze up because I have 4GB of ram.
Thanks a lot for the tip.

[mld4165]

I have the same card and I tried this but it still fails.

[ihavenoname]

Most of it is in the title. I am on Fedora 10. When I use the gnome version and compiz it works fast. But when I use kde, the compositor is incredibly slow. This is not the case on other distros. I have an intel 945gma video card on this laptop. Can anyone shed some light on this issue?

[leigh123linux]

Thread merged.

[rdieter]

It unfortunately seems the new intel-2.5 driver in f10 includes quite a bit of regressions for i945, me included. ):

For me, while F-9/opengl compositing was rock-solid fast, F-10 is abysmal, I've resorted to Xrender-based compositing (kwin advanced setting), which is at least acceptable stability, performance wise.

[ihavenoname]

as bad as this sounds, I'm quite glad I'm not alone in this :P. In all seriousness it never occurred to me that it was a memory leak. Anyways, is there anyway that we can use F10 with the older drivers?

If someone will give me instructions to compile them into an rpm I'll do it. (Can we pull the old F9 drivers and re-build them for f10?

I am all for the bleeding edge thing, but only when it makes sense, does this driver fix ANYTHING at all??? Cause it's breaking a lot.

[ihavenoname]

hmm.. I downloaded the fedora 9 i810 drivers and installed them with

rpm -Uvh xorg-x11-drv-i810-2.2.1-24.fc9.i386.rpm --force

Which isn't "safe" or "clean" but it works. I tried to rebuild them initially but ran into problems and I'm a bit busy to work that much on them. It seems to have fixed the issue, I'll test more and see if I have any problems.

Note: this is probably best used for emergencies only. If there is a relevent bug in bugzilla that is the place to get this fixed.

[ihavenoname]

what is the status of this? Any words? Has someone filed a bugzilla report?

[leigh123linux]

what is the status of this? Any words? Has someone filed a bugzilla report?

No, we thought you reported it

[ihavenoname]

No, we thought you reported it

Now that you mention it...I thought I did too . In fact I did not...I was also using kde4 at the time and after noticing konquerors flash problems I reported that bug and completely forgot about that issue since I don't really use a compositor in kde4.....oh well.


Also, I am not always on fedora (in fact I very rarely am near fedora these days since I have been busy testing other distros new releases (debian, opensuse, jaunty etc.). So i will file the initial report and post the link here but someone else needs to (please) subscribe to the bug for testing purposes. Thank!

[ihavenoname]

sorry for taking so long to respond!

turns out I didn't have to file a report after all. I am not on fedora or near it (it's not even installed).
If someone has it installed could they please post the required information so this bug can be resolved soon!!!

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=475510