Organising an ARM performance drive?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi all,

As you all know, this list has been quiet of late, and
gnome-embedded-list is retired.

Recently during a couple of events I attended (OSiM World, the Maemo
Summit and ELC), a number of people have signalled to me that they are
interested in working together on a performance review of the GNOME
stack on ARM. Others have indicated that they're concerned about
performance of newer GNOME developments on ARM. This smells to me like
an ideal opportunity to collaborate.

Is this the kind of project which I could get buy-in and support from
people here, and ideally empower half a dozen people here to be the
drivers for the project (based on hardware availability & skills &
resources - none of which I have in abundance)?

My thoughts are that we could attach this in one of two ways - from the
top down or from the bottom up. Either we look at applications using the
GNOME stack, and try to profile them on ARM and x86 to identify
bottlenecks, or we go the other way, and write a bunch of test programs
to stress individual points in the GNOME stack and identify places we
can make improvements that way.

It seems best to my mind to start from the real-world performance
problems and work down. Otherwise you end up gamind the profiling suite
rather than optimising for real world use.

Some obvious opportunities for performance checking at the GNOME level
are Gstreamer, Clutter, PulseAudio, GTK+, pango and perhaps even Xorg.
Suggestions for best ways to find specific performance issues which we
can then go about getting fixed are welcome.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org