Re: [Chromium-users] [DMX-Devel] Chromium and DMX beginner troubles

[Sean A. <ah...@or...>]

Andres Felipe Molina Villamizar wrote:
> So far the only way DMX runs is if in fact there is a window manager running
> on the back-end nodes. Otherwise, how am I able to run xhost+... so that my
> front-end can connect?

Running "xhost +" has nothing to do with window managers.  It's a 
modification of the authentication mechanism of the X server.  It has 
nothing to do with the layout and geometry of X client windows.

And anyway, you should avoid "xhost +" wherever possible.  It creates 
one of the most insecure computing environments that you can possibly 
deploy.  You are saying, in essence, "I give everyone on the entire 
internet access to read every keystroke, mouse movement, and window 
content.  I also will let them inject whatever they want into my system."

I would recommend exploring the use of xauth(1) to manage your access 
instead.

> I am using the xorg code. Version according to rpm retrieved by yum:
> xorg-x11-server-Xdmx-1.1.1-48.41.el5
> 
> The good news is that I finally got chromium and dmx to work. Turns out that
> I had an error with my dmx.conf file. I was only declaring the backend
> machine in the hosts array and it created conflicts elsewhere.

Glad to hear you worked it out.

> This leads me to my new problem. I've been running frame rate tests using
> the glxgears app on chromium+dmx seems to run considerably slower than dmx
> by itself (~1700 FPS vs ~9800 FPS, respectively). More so, I don't see any
> GL_CR_dmx in the list of OpenGL Extensions given by glxinfo (according to
> the docs page I should). Is there any other way of checking if chromium is
> running?

If you aren't using autodmx.conf, then you absolutely can't tell through 
the method you're using, since the only process you're capturing is 
glxgears through crappfaker.  Everything else is going through DMX's 
GLX/Proxy.

You can tell it's running by things like messages output by the back-end 
servers (assuming you have compiled without RELEASE turned on), the 
crserver processes floating upward in "top", and by tossing in various 
SPUs (print) to monitor progress.

Your speed is going to vary greatly depending on things like:
1. Whether you are using display lists, and whether you have display 
list processing turned on.
2. The bucketing mode you are using in the tilesorter.
3. How many tiles you have.  Two tiles will give you lower performance 
with Chromium.  You're likely better using just GLX/Proxy.
4. What your underlying network fabric is.

The rest of the Chromium community will have to weigh in here.

> I am running glxgears manually, like so:
> --------------------
> guaviare $: python dmx.conf
> *start crservers on guaviare and guaviare3*
> guaviare $: crappfaker glxgears

You might want to try using autodmx.conf.  It makes things a lot easier 
for launching.  As an example, all processes that use OpenGL will be 
forwarded through Chromium.  Also, you don't have to launch the 
mothership, and you don't have to use crappfaker.

> To be honest, this is kind of a miss-matched setup I have going on. Chromium
> 1.9 has been compiled from source. DMX was entirely different story. I
> downloaded the sourceforge source .tar and compiled it in order to get the
> libdmx.a library needed by chromium, following the instructions on the Docs
> site. I this must be wrong on several levels, but this was before I found
> out dmx had been integrated into Xorg.
> 
> What would be the correct way of installing these two?

I would get your libdmx.a from your xorg RPMs.  I would compile Chromium 
from source.

-Sean

__
Sean Ahern
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
AIM: ornlsean
865-241-3748