google earth, fedora 9, intel 945GM, drmWaitVBlank

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Google Earth can be excruciatingly slow on a misconfigured system. For me, it was extra confusing because lookie here:

[achiang@ethanol ~]$ glxinfo | grep direct
direct rendering: Yes

That’s goodness, and so one would think that I’m all set, right? Not so. I was seeing these errors:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.

After endless googling, I got a clue to install something called driconf, except the concomitant advice was bad as it referred to obsolete options.

But hey, let’s use our brain and guess that the error message about drmWaitVBlank means we should change the magic setting labelled “Synchronization with vertical refresh (swap intervals)”. (This would be after launching driconf as root, duh.)

On my system, the default was “Initial swap interval 0, obey application’s choice”, which resulted in epic fail.

Changing it to “Never synchronize with vertical refresh, ignore application’s choice” was the answer for me.

This would be with DRIconf 0.9.1, Fedora Core 9, the i915 module, and:

Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)

Hope this helps. Now I can use Google Earth to plot the ridiculous 137 mile, one-day bike ride I did over the weekend.

Edit: ok, I lied — the other thing you have to do to make Google Earth perform at a reasonable speed is to go to View -> Atmosphere and turn that display off

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7 Comments

  1. Jan — July 5, 2008 #

    Hey man, you made may day up, finally google earth works again on my laptop :) Thank you!

  2. G — July 19, 2008 #

    Awesome man, thanks for sharing the solution with us!

  3. Devin Henderson — July 27, 2008 #

    Alex:

    My friend is running Fedora 9 with the same graphics card but changing Driver to ‘i915′ (or ‘i810′ for that matter) results in several very fast flashes of the screen and GDM/X never comes up! Any ideas? He’s got a Compaq with the same Intel video card you mention above and Fedora 9 i686.

    Thanks,
    Devin

  4. alex — July 27, 2008 #

    Devin,

    Well, the first thing I’d do is look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and look for warnings/errors. From there, you can google and see if anyone else has had similar problems.

    If that fails, file a bugzilla. :)

    Hope this helps.

  5. stav — July 30, 2008 #

    My console message was:
    do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don’t seem to be working correctly.
    Try adjusting the vblank_mode configuration parameter.

    It ran very slowly until I followed the advice here and it works fine now. Thanks alex!

  6. Indra Gunawan — August 13, 2008 #

    Thanks bro!!! It’s very helpful …

  7. Pavel Murat — October 22, 2008 #

    Alex, lot of thanks – very useful! I think though that it is not the i915 mode but turning off the atmosphere display in Google Earth which makes the difference. Guys, reading this after me – if Google Earth performance is your only issue, you may want to try turning the atmosphere off first…

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