Intel ( i845G ) profiling

[Daniel Kasak]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 16:54 -0700, Eric Anholt wrote: 
> On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 12:06 +1100, Daniel Kasak wrote:
> > On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 11:12 -0700, Eric Anholt wrote:
> > > > If so, the reason we're falling back is because the A8 format (0,0,0,a)
> > > > is unsupported on that chipset.  But we've got the I8 format which
> > > > produces (a,a,a,a), and if we're using the a8 picture as a
> > > > non-component-alpha mask, we'll only use that fourth component.  For a
> > > > more general implementation, those color channels could be treated as
> > > > zero by using ARGx_SEL_ONE | ARGx_INVERT when reading them instead of
> > > > ARGx_SEL_TEXELy.
> > > 
> > > Untested patch is up at:
> > > git://people.freedesktop.org/~anholt/xf86-video-intel i845-render-fix
> > 
> > Cool. Thanks :)
> > 
> > What are the pre-requisites for this branch to build? I've built libdrm,
> > mesa, xserver, libX11, cairo & pixman from today's git. But building the
> > i845-render-fix branch of xf86-video-intel I get:
> 
> What, you want the patches I give you to actually compile? :P
> 
> New version pushed that's less broken, but with the same level of
> guarantees as before (meaning: none)

Wow! That makes a big difference. EXA without a compositing manager is
now quite fast. It's not as fast as XAA, but it's a *whole* lot better
than before, and certainly usable. With xcompmgr it's also very good -
this combo was previously completely unusable. With ecomorph ( compiz
port ) it's a lot better than before ( before it was ridiculously
slow ), but it's not _quite_ fast enough to call 'snappy'. Anyway, it's
a huge improvement on before :)

I had to downgrade to xserver-1.4 and mesa-7.0.2 because my git build of
these would lock hard on startup ( with any version of
xf86-video-intel ). Oh well ...

I've tested for about 2 hours now, and haven't had any problems.

I've done another round of profiling, with expedite and our internal CRM
package, both with & without ecomorph running. The results are at:
http://entropy.homelinux.org/i845_render_fix_benchmarking.tar.bz2
My original results ( with the latest released driver ) are still at:
http://entropy.homelinux.org/intel_benchmarking.tar.bz2

Thanks again for working on this :)

--
Daniel Kasak
IT Developer
NUS Consulting Group
Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway
North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060
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email: dkasak at nusconsulting.com.au
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