GNOME 40 available in Gentoo
GNOME 40 was released at the end of March, and yesterday I added the last bits of it to Gentoo. You may not think that's fast, and you'd be right, but it's a lot faster than any GNOME release has been added to Gentoo that I can recall. I wasn't looking to become Gentoo's GNOME maintainer when I joined the team 18 months ago. I only wanted to use a GNOME release that was a little less stale. So how did I get here?
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Combining constants in i965 fragment shaders
On Intel's Gen graphics, three source instructions like MAD and LRP cannot have constants as arguments. When support for MAD instructions was introduced with Sandybridge, we assumed the choice between a MOV+MAD and a MUL+ADD sequence was inconsequential, so we chose to perform the multiply and add operations separately. Revisiting that assumption has uncovered some interesting things about the hardware and has lead us to some pretty nice performance improvements.
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Laptop choices and aftermath
In November I was lamenting the lack of selection in credible Haswell-powered laptops for Mesa development. I chose the 15" MacBook Pro, while coworkers picked the 13" MBP and the System76 Galago Pro. After using the three laptops for a few months, I review our choices and whether they panned out like we expected.
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Difficulty in Finding a Good Development Laptop
When I started at working at Intel last year on the open source 3D driver I was given a spare Lenovo T420s (Sandybridge) as my development machine. Almost everyone on my team had upgraded to Ivy Bridge by February, but I planned just to hold out a few months until Haswell was released. I then spent all summer wondering where the Haswell laptops were, and only now, five months later has Lenovo released Thinkpads with Haswell. It's time for a new development machine, and after months of research the only conclusion I've come to is that it's really hard to find a good laptop for my (admittedly strange) case.
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My time optimizing graphics performance on the OLPC XO 1.75 laptop
Last summer after a year of graduate school, I was looking for an interesting project to work on. After asking around, Chris Ball found me in the #xorg-devel IRC channel and set me up working with One Laptop per Child. I started working with Chris and Jon Nettleton on improving the graphics performance of the ARM-based XO 1.75 laptop. The graphics drivers were in a state of flux, and in a number of cases the Sugar interface felt noticeably slower than on the VIA-powered XO 1.5. We wanted to know why it was slower and how to quantitatively measure graphics performance of real-world applications.