Re: Organising an ARM performance drive?

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Mike Turquette wrote:
> An interesting place to start is the Always Innovating Touchbook
> (http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/home/index.htm).  I hate to be a
> broken record on this product but it is the only real ARM netbook that
> I'm aware of.  It ships with Angstrom running a mostly-GNOME
> environment with some Xfce thrown in.  The user experience on this
> device is pretty bad.

Has anyone done any profiling with it to find specific issues we can
fix? Stormy was asking me who I thought should get these a while back -
perhaps here is a good place to ask.

> All of that said, the first thing we need is a test suite/performance
> benchmarking suite.  If that doesn't exist in a useful manner to us
> already then we're at a dead stop until that gets complete IMO.

So - if this is a good place to start, let's start there.

Can we, module by module, come up with a performance test suite (it
might only have a dozen tests to begin with) which might mimic
real-world API usage, and do profiling on x86 and ARM? Maybe nothing
shows up, in which case we can move on quickly and write more tests.

I know that there are performance tests for Cairo already - let's start
from that experience and see if we can reproduce the same success
elsewhere. GStreamer has also had extensive performance testing. Prime
candidates for new tests seem to me to be GConf (and maybe DConf?) and
glib - and perhaps pulseaudio - and we should be re-running the Cairo
and GStreamer test suites to evaluate their performance now. I think
Clutter also has a performance test suite.

The ideal way to do this is on some kind of build farm. Do we have a way
to do an ARM build & run a performance test suite in an automated way?

Is there anyone either prepared to liberate someone to get started on
the basic framework, or prepared to put in the effort to get something
up & running that we can start generating some kind of meaningful
figures from?

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org