Graphics driver confusion.

[Gat Pelsinger]

On Ubuntu right now. How do I know if I am using the old Intel Xorg driver or the Intel modesetting driver? There is no apparent way to tell. I do want to use the modesetting one, right?

 

Hardware accelerated video decoding does not work on Chromium browsers out of the box. I remember I did something while I was on Arch to get that running, but it is such an unofficial way. I find there are so many ways to get it running, and some of them are outdated. Currently have the intel-media-va-driver installed but there is also a non-free driver for it. Which one is better? People also recommended me to install the VAAPI driver for video codecs, but I personally didn't see any change after installing that (maybe because I wasn't using a program that utilizes it).

[Nayr438]

Ubuntu along with most other distros don't ship the intel xorg driver and you should be falling back to modesetting.

 

You also want non-free, this package typically includes patent encumbered things or things that may conflict with licensing. Most codecs fall into this category. If your Intel iGPU is Broadwell or newer then you also want intel-media-driver.

 

8 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Hardware accelerated video decoding does not work on Chromium browsers out of the box.

Not all builds support it and it's considered experimental. It seems to work for some people and not others. If you want Video Hardware Acceleration in a browser on Linux I really recommend just using Firefox with Wayland for now.
 

[Gat Pelsinger]

21 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Not all builds support it

No, it does. I just need to do things. Like I think I made chromium point to a driver or a library or something and it worked. Just followed a YouTube video.

[Gat Pelsinger]

23 minutes ago, Nayr438 said:

Ubuntu along with most other distros don't ship the intel xorg driver

xserver-xorg-video-intel is installed, if I search through apt list. How do I really know if modesetting is running or not?

[Ralphred]

2 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

How do I really know if modesetting is running or not?

less /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Or wherever you have your logger set-up to log to.

If it doesn't use modesetting, man xorg.conf tells you how write a xorg config file to guide it that way.

[Nayr438]

4 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

xserver-xorg-video-intel is installed, if I search through apt list. How do I really know if modesetting is running or not?

idk when or why it was added back but, https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/intel_graphics#With_the_modesetting_driver
 

Which actually it shouldn't matter, Intel and AMD default to Wayland on Ubuntu where this xorg driver shouldn't matter.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Nayr438

 

Yes on Arch, modesetting is active my default. I think on Debian and based, the legacy Xorg is still active.

 

And oh, I at the login I have options of "Ubuntu" and "Ubuntu on Xorg". So Ubuntu is running by default on Wayland? And if so then why does the driver not matter then?

[Nayr438]

Just now, Gat Pelsinger said:

And oh, I at the login I have options of "Ubuntu" and "Ubuntu on Xorg". So Ubuntu is running by default on Wayland?

Unless you pick Ubuntu on Xorg your using Wayland. You can check in Settings -> About.
 

1 minute ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

And if so then why does the driver not matter then?

Because it's not your actual graphics driver, it's a userspace 2D driver for xorg. Wayland doesn't use this.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Nayr438

Oh no way, Ubuntu runs on Wayland by default? Tbh, I like Xorg because it is much lighter and honestly doesn't much problems. If I upon open up intel_gpu_top (from intel-gpu-tools package), I can see the integrated memory controller I/O speed. When using the default Ubuntu option, I have like 1.2 GiB/s of memory I/O, but on Xorg, I have like 308 MiB/s. And I don't know if this is just me, but animations also feel smooth, or at least they don't stutter sometimes. Should I really use Xorg only?

 

@Nayr438 (I think you missed this post).

[Nayr438]

Yes, this has been the default for awhile for anyone who doesn't have a NVIDIA GPU. You should use Wayland if possible.
xorg-server is pretty much on life support with distros already discussing dropping it. The core maintainers of xorg-server were RedHat which moved all development efforts to wayland putting xorg-server in minimal maintenance mode until the end of RHEL 9. With that said there are still migration issues and not all software behaves correctly on Wayland, at the same time Wayland adoption has been picking up and some projects have started to explicitly depend on Wayland.
As a note, software that targets X11 should continue to still mostly work under xwayland.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Nayr438

 

But I mentioned that I like Xorg. It is much lighter. I don't like really care if it is getting deprecated if it just runs faster. Everything seems same and I don't see any bugs.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Nayr438 @Ralphred

 

Running inxi -G shows that modesetting is loaded and fbdev, vesa are unloaded. So even if the xorg driver is installed (probably either because of backup or because it comes with the xorg package), I think it is still using the modesetting driver, both in X11 and Wayland.

[Ralphred]

11 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

Should I really use Xorg only?

It's YMMV thing; if it's better for you then use it, Linux is all about choice.

If your hardware acceleration isn't working the places to check for "exhaustive instructions" are the arch and gentoo wikis, because those two only work when you tell them to, so instructions on "telling it to" are included there. They are also worth a look because they will tell you what your GPU chipset can/can't do regarding codecs.

[Gat Pelsinger]

@Ralphred

 

Got hardware acceleration working. Followed this - 

 

Now I actually don't if that enabled acceleration or it was enabled by default on Ubuntu. First of all, I did not install the driver that was mentioned, I just put the chrome flags config. I was thinking that it didn't work, but it turns out interacting with the GUI really spikes the CPU usage. If I do nothing and let the 4k 60fps video play, CPU usage does get low at the point that I am confident that acceleration is working. Also monitored through intel_gpu_top and decoding is working. So I don't actually know if this was the case before me writing the config file. I might have been thinking the high CPU usage for no acceleration but I might have been interacting with the GUI.

[Ralphred]

4 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

interacting with the GUI really spikes the CPU usage

That's causing me disquiet; when you say "interacting" do you mean clicking on things, or just moving the mouse pointer about?

[Gat Pelsinger]

1 minute ago, Ralphred said:

That's causing me disquiet; when you say "interacting" do you mean clicking on things, or just moving the mouse pointer about?

Just moving the mouse around having the GUI pop up does spike the CPU usage.

[Ralphred]

22 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

does spike the CPU usage.

Enough to "interfere", or just a noticeable increase?

[Gat Pelsinger]

Just now, Ralphred said:

Enough to "interfere", or just a noticeable increase?

noticeable

[Ralphred]

57 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

noticeable

To be fair, that's to be expected in your scenario.