Re: Organising an ARM performance drive?

[Stefan Kost <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

hi,

Dave Neary schrieb:
> 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)?
>   
Yes! Maemo is definitely interested here.
> 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.
>   
There are a few known things that need to be driven.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498810
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440740
> 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.
>   
We'd also like to see more of the gnome stack use or consider using ORC
[1]. There is some experimental use of it in GStreamer, some thoughts of
using it in PulseAudio. I think during the barcelona video hackfest in
end of november it will be discussed to use it in pixman. It could be
used for gdk_pixbuf and for sure elsewhere too.

Then of course generic optimizations do help as well. E.g. the gobject
performance work that alex larsson, benjamin otte and edward hervey
are/were doing.

Stefan

[1] http://code.entropywave.com/projects/orc/

> Cheers,
> Dave.
>
>