[yocto] "Crazy" Xorg memory usage after upgrading from Daisy to Fido

[Chris Tapp]

I’ve got an application that I’ve had running nicely under Daisy for some time. As Daisy is now a bit old, I decided to move the application to Fido. I’m using the meta-intel/isg/valleyisland BSP and also switched to using its Fido branch.

The move only required a few minor changes and allowed me to drop a Daisy “updates” layer that I had been using for things like gstreamer-1.0.

However, there is one behaviour which is killing me - I keep getting oom-killer events!

The application is basically an OpenGL-ES 2.0 application that renders various bits of text, images and streams captured from a gstreamer pipeline at 60 Hz to a 1080 screen.

Under Daisy this generally took just under 50% CPU and used a modest percentage of the 4 GB system memory - i.e. no where near running out and usage was just about static.

Under Fido the CPU usage is about the same and the memory used by the application itself looks reasonable when compared to Daisy (and usage is static). However, the memory used by XOrg is far from constant or stable - it basically has a VSZ value cycling from about 630m to 2989m with the cycle period being in the order of 5 to 10 seconds. Peaks in XOrg memory usage coincide with stutters in video playback within my app (audio is unaffected).

Monitoring /proc/meminfo when this is going on shows that “Shmem” usage is following the same pattern as the memory used by XOrg (i.e. Shmem usage is high at the same time). If the values are plotted on a graph they appear to show that Shmem usage grows linearly and then falls rapidly when nearly all the free memory has been exhausted, perhaps in response to a delayed garbage collection run.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I should be looking at to work out what’s going on?

Are there any significant changes between XOrg under Daisy and Fido that could be causing this?

Could this be related to the meta-intel video drivers?

Any feedback / comments would be really appreciated.

Thanks :-)

--

Chris Tapp
opensource at keylevel.com
www.keylevel.com

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You can tell you're getting older when your car insurance gets real cheap!

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