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.
Read More – – Tags: freedesktop intel linux mesa xorg
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.
Read More – – Tags: arm freedesktop linux olpc pixman xorg
Optimizing pixman for Loongson: Process and Results
The Lemote Yeeloong is a small notebook that is often the computer of choice for Free Software advocates, including Richard Stallman. It's powered by an 800 MHz STMicroelectronics Loongson 2F processor and has an antiquated Silicon Motion 712 graphics chip. The SM712's acceleration features are pretty subpar for today's standards, and performance of the old XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) that supports the SM712 has slowly decayed as developers move to support newer hardware and newer acceleration architectures. In short, graphics performance of the SM712 isn't very good with new X servers, so how can we improve it?
Read More – – Tags: freedesktop gentoo linux loongson mips pixman xorg yeeloong
My Google Summer of Code proposal
I've been involved with X.Org for a few months now. I want to increase my involvement, and at the same time learn the ropes. I also need something to do this summer–and that's why I've applied to the Google Summer of Code.
Read More – – Tags: glint gsoc kms linux xorg
The State of Alpha Linux
Software is never finished; it's forgotten. There is always one more enhancement to be made or one little quirk to work out. Sometimes there are even big problems. It happens from time to time. It's expected, and it's expected that the problems will be fixed. After spending quite a bit of time recently working with Linux on the Alpha platform, I've come to realize we face some very serious problems. And unfortunately, these may not ever be fixed, putting in jeopardy the future (hah!) of Alpha/Linux. I decided to articulate these problems in an email to the Linux on Alpha Processors mailing list in order to inform and ultimately find solutions and breathe a bit of life back into Alpha/Linux. I'd like to think that Alpha/Linux isn't a piece of forgotten software, not yet.