On Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 08:12:21AM -0400, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Thu, Sep 07, 2017 at 07:57:58AM +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote: > > That's fascinating because I found the opposite -- my circa-2009 > > self-built Intel Core i7 920-based machine surged ahead when I upgraded > > from jessie to stretch -- really felt like everything was that little > > bit more alive. I'd had no complaints about jessie performance but > > suddenly everything was that bit nippier. > > Video drivers, most likely. Jessie's X used an "intel" driver for > Intel graphics chipsets, whereas stretch's X uses a "modeset" driver. > > Notoriously in jessie, some of the newer Intel chipsets actually needed > (or greatly wanted) a backported stretch xserver-xorg-video-intel > package for proper performance. (Your older machine may or may not be > one of these.) >
Did wonder about video drivers -- but the video hardware is nVidia here and the driver in use was and is the proprietary nVidia driver. Albeit now the "legacy" one, as the card is old -- the transition to which briefly gave me the willies when I migrated from jessie to stretch; a while back I made a thread here about that, all long since sorted out now. I famously have never been able to get the nouveau drivers working at all. A looong time ago, there was a period where the nVidia proprietary driver was not very stable with my chipset, or at least the combination of the nVidia driver and Gnome 3 was toxic, and I tried nouveau then with no success. I tried again a bit later as an experiment to see if I could get away from proprietary code -- no dice. I gave up at that point as by then the nVidia driver was both faster and stable. Since then, touch wood, it has been solid and performant. I reckon you are right that the improvement I saw is most likely to come from video driver improvements somehow, but that means an improvement between the nVidia driver version in Jessie and the legacy video driver version in stretch. Anyway whatever it is, that's not going to stop me giving Debian in general credit for the improvement! Me like! Mark
