[Intel-gfx] [ANNOUNCE] xf86-video-intel 2.8.0

[Carl Worth]

On Fri, 2009-07-31 at 10:10 +0300, Timo Jyrinki wrote:
> Hi. Thanks for the release. It seems to be now quite stable after all
> the KMS/GEM/DRI2/UXA hassle, I'm happy to say (and so are / will be
> the other users).

You're quite welcome. I'm happy to hear that the driver is performing
well for you.

> However, Intel is getting its worth of bad publicity because of all
> the stability problems (now addressed) and performance problems (only
> getting worse). Could there be at least some blog post analysis about
> what's going to be done about performance?

I did recently make a blog post about performance measurement at least:

	http://cworth.org/intel/performance_measurement/

The point I make there is that microbenchmarks like gtkperf don't really
tell us what happens with real applications.

> Newest Phoronix numbers just in:
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_q309_flakes&num=2
> - Ubuntu 9.10 (2.6.31, 2.8.0, 7.5) is much slower, even double in some
> tests, than Ubuntu 9.04 (2.6.28, 2.6.x (EXA), 7.4). And Ubuntu 9.04,
> where GEM was introduced, was already 2x slower than Ubuntu 8.10/8.04
> (intel 2.2-2.4 / EXA / no GEM) in many important areas.

What I see there is lots of gtkperf microbenchmarks, which as I put
forth in the blog report, don't capture realistic application behavior.
So there may or may not be any real performance problem based on those
numbers. It's really hard to know.

I'm not really familiar with Qgears nor JXRenderMark but they also sound
like microbenchmarks, (with names like "Transformed Blit Bilinear").

I do appreciate that people are performing benchmark measurements on our
various releases, but I'd much rather see a result like:

	"Firefox is 20% slower with 2.8.0 compared to 2.6.3" or so.

That's something that would indicate an actually significant performance
problem and would be much more compelling to result in work to fix it.
And the cairo-perf-trace tool I describe in the blog post above provides
results exactly like that, (for firefox, gnome-terminal, evince, etc.
and anyone can generate traces for any other cairo-based applications).

And of course, I'd even much rather see reports from cairo-perf-trace
showing performance improvements rather than slowdowns. :-)

Either way, I will look forward to measurements based on real-world
loads. And I can say that with the huge architectural reworks behind us,
and some serious stabilization done, performance issues are very near
the top of the list for several of us working on Intel graphics drivers.

-Carl

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