EXA and MigrationHeuristic

[Stephane Marchesin]

On 5/29/08, Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:

>
> Without this heuristic firefox 3 is so slow on unaccelerated drivers
>  any normal user will just dump his video card or Linux (page load
>  times measured in seconds with CPU pegged at 100% and not every user
>  has multicore hardware). So keeping the current default won't win you
>  anything except lost users. It's not bad it's catastrophic
>

If no one works on fixing these issues, EXA will never be usable, and
we'll never have hardware accelerated fonts, rotation, scaling... This
is the reason nouveau only has EXA for example, we're not interested
in fixing old technology.

You have to keep in mind that having a fast desktop is not something
that will happen overnight, and it requires help from testers,
reporting and fixing specific issues like this. Developers are only a
handful, and will not always be able to encounter and fix all possible
issues before releases. But if everyone works around the issues
instead of reporting and fixing them, they are actively slowing down
improvements in the whole linux graphics stack.

So yeah, you might lose a couple of users, short term. But we might
lose all of them long term if we can't provide proper hardware
acceleration for the whole desktop.

Stephane