I think I finally, truly have a solution to my mouse lag issue. It didn’t seem to matter what distro I was using; a few hours of surfing on my No. 2 laptop left me with awful mouse lag and stutter. It was hideous.
And when I installed Xubuntu for the GAG sessions, it was even worse. Immediately after booting, I was getting vicious half-second lags at intervals of two or three seconds apart. I’m thinking the reduced system loads on FVWM-Crystal or Openbox setups made things better with those WMs. Installing Xubuntu put too much weight on it, and that made it all the worse.
But what was weird was an error message that would pop up when Xubuntu shut down.
cpufreq: change failed with new_state 0 and result 0
Bizarre stuff. I never saw that with any other WM. Regardless, I fired up Google and did a little poking around. Most of the stuff was too deeply mired in kernel issues, but I found one post that mentioned the same error message, and the suggestion that disabling cpufreq could help.
So i started looking into cpufreq, and found the cpufrequtils package in the repositories. I installed it, thinking it might pull in some sort of library for cpufreq that would erase the lag. No luck. So I started digging around with cpufreq-set and cpufreq-info commands.
The man pages suggested using “governors” to control speed settings, and when I did this
sudo cpufreq-set -g performance
The lag was instantly gone. I’ve left the laptop running for about eight hours now, with screensavers, XChat, browsers and everything running, and the lag hasn’t come back. And this is after a cold boot that left me with rampant, vicious lag.
Now I know what you’re thinking: This is your fifth post about mouse lag, and the last four posts all claimed to have fixed it.
I agree. So I tell you what I’ll do: I’m not going to call this the cure yet, until I can get an entirely new Ubuntu setup in place, with FVWM-Crystal (or maybe Openbox; I haven’t decided), and wait for that $&@#! lag to reappear.
And then we’ll see what happens when I set the governor. I can hardly wait. 😈
Ah yes, I remember that error on a laptop. Ages back.
Fixed it after reading this, in particular mjwood0’s post:
‘The incorrect speedstep module is being loaded.
To fix this, edit /usr/share/powernowd/cpufreq-detect.sh so it reads like this:
# Two modules for PIII-M depending the chipset.
# modprobe speedstep-ich$EXT || modprobe speestep-smi$EXT would be another way
if [ -f $IOPORTS ] && grep -q ‘Intel .*ICH’ $IOPORTS ; then
PIII_MODULE=speedstep-ich
else
# PIII_MODULE=speedstep-smi
PIII_MODULE=speedstep_ich
fi’
Hmmm. Didn’t work on this one. I still get lag (although it’s not as bad as before), and when I apply the performance governor, I get an error message now:
wrong, unkown or unhandled CPU?Just as a note, this is a Pentium III Coppermine 750Mhz (well, /proc/cpuinfo says 746Mhz) chip in a Latitude CPx J750GT.
Thanks for the link, though. For now I’ll just write a little startup script that sets the governor on boot. But first, it’s time to scrape the drive clean. 🙂