DRI/DRM profiling for performance analysis?

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 09:15:18PM -0700, Eric Anholt wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:22:35 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi> wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Do we currently have a method of profiling DRI/DRM drivers?
> > 
> > I was thinking that it would be interesting to:
> > 
> > 1) Execute a benchmark, or some "timedemo" of a game
> > 2) See how many times each dri/drm driver function is called, 
> >    maybe top 20 most often called functions, 
> >    and the total cpu time used for those functions.
> > 
> > So you could see that:
> > 
> > 1) some function is called often, but it doesn't take much total cpu time.
> > 2) some function is called just a couple of times, but it takes a lot of cpu time.
> > 
> > And everything in between.. would be good hints to use for optimizing the apps/drivers,
> > and for comparison between different versions..
> > 
> > Does this make sense? 
> 
> The tool to use is called "sysprof" and is ridiculously easy to use (on
> 32-bit x86).  Click start, click stop, see where time was spent, go fix
> that.

Thanks!

That might make interesting addition to things like Phoronix benchmarks..
to compare the differences between driver versions.

-- Pasi