Not to thread the X server

Lukas Hejtmanek xhejtman at ics.muni.cz
Thu Jun 19 14:05:52 PDT 2008


On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 12:47:03AM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote:
> While the world is moving towards complex NUMA architectures, you
> would like to stick with an old-school single-image multithreaded
> process?

In such a case, letting the applications to do Xserver's work on their own
will not help as well. I think.

> I think that the my desktop should consist of a number of compute-bound
> processes running in parallel, with the X server being a lightweight
> process that doesn't execute any CPU-intensive code.

In this case, you would need that all the CPU cores processing those processes
need to be 'close' to GPU cores which does not fit into the complex NUMA
architecture.

> Please correct me if I am wrong, but I was under the impression that
> there is only one command pipeline on a GPU, no matter how parallel.

fair enough. But on the other hand, the driver runs code that does prepare
stage of operations, there are also some memcpys and so on and all this stuff
is not completely CPU free (i.e., it drains CPU power).

Moreover, using the threads, the command pipeline will more likely be full of
requests.

-- 
Lukáš Hejtmánek



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