Possible Performance Regression with Mesa

[Joao Paulo Silva Goncalves]

Hello all,

We might have encountered a performance regression after upgrading from Mesa
2022.0.3 to 2024.0.2. During our automated hardware tests using LAVA, we noticed
a lower score on glmark2 when we upgraded from the OpenEmbedded release from
Kirkstone to Scartgarth. After conducting some internal tests, it doesn't seem
to be an issue with the kernel or the glmark2 tool version, so we suspect that
the issue may be related to something within Mesa. We believe that there might
be something we're overlooking. Do you have any ideas or insights about
this problem?

Here are some details about our hardware platform and some tests we
have conducted:

Platform: Toradex Apalis iMX6 - NXP i.MX 6Q/6D Arm Cortex A9 with
Vivante GC2000 rev 5108 using Etnaviv.

Tests:

Kernel Versions - v6.1.87 and v6.9-rc4
Glmark2 Versions - 2021.12 and 2023.01

We combined different upstream kernel, Mesa, and glmark2 versions and
ran glmark2 on each
combination on a mostly idle system. The benchmark was run 20 times on
each combination.

Some Results:

|Kernel   |   Mesa    | glmark2 | Max-Min Score
v6.1.87     2022.0.3    2021.12   449-495
v6.9-rc4    2022.0.3    2021.12   452-502
v6.1.87     2022.0.3    2023.01   453-504
v6.9-rc4    2022.0.3    2023.01   455-496
v6.1.87     2024.0.2    2021.12   301-313
v6.9-rc4    2024.0.2    2021.12   298-320
v6.1.87     2024.0.2    2023.01   301-313
v6.9-rc4    2024.0.2    2023.01   295-310


Regards,
Joao Paulo Goncalves