Re: Organising an ARM performance drive?

[Peter Robinson <pbrobinson gmail com>]

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.

It might be worth checking out some of the cairo list archives as
they've been doing quite a bit of optimisation of pixman and cairo for
the arm platform (primarily for Mozilla Mobile I think) so that might
be a good spot to see what they've been up to, obviously gnome mobile
will automatically get the those advantages as well. I think there's
some work going on in gstreamer as well [1]. It seems there could be
some reasonably wins.

Peter

[1] http://ickle.wordpress.com/2009/11/22/videohackfest/