On Nov 3, 2008, at 11:52 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Joerg Schilling wrote: >> Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com> wrote: >> >>> That's an odd comment, considering most reviews of FF3 I've seen >>> commends it for being both faster and leaking less memory tan its >>> predecessor. >>> >>> It's certainly been stable long term on my desktop since 3.0.3. >>> >> >> What is the last time you used it on Sparc? >> >> Netscape always was slower on sparc systems then on even slower x86 >> machines. >> I would guess that there is strange byte order dependent code >> inside the >> graphics engine. > > I don't know of any "strange byte order dependent code" in the Cairo > graphics > engine used in current Firefox, but I do know of several simpler > reasons it's > faster on x86 than SPARC: > > - it makes heavy use of the Render extension if the X server > supports it. > Xorg supports Render on almost all cards, with several providing > hardware > acceleration for it, which helps x86. On SPARC, only a few > drivers for > Xsun were updated to add Render support, and it's off by default. > For Xorg, > unless you've added Martin's drivers, only XVR-2500 has a Xorg > driver > provided so far - and I don't know what level of Render > acceleration any > of those provide. > > - The pixman backend used for various graphics rendering has code > for MMX & SSE > acceleration, but none for VIS. Given the upstream projects' > target > audience are approximately 99% x86 and 0% SPARC, they've > concentrated their > optimization efforts there.
Currently on Solaris, libpixman in system cairo or Firefox doesn't build with MMX & SSE acceleration, that is something we can improve for x86. Ginn > > > - Virtually any graphics card on a PC of today is several > generations newer > than any SPARC graphics card you've used. > > -- > -Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com > Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-discuss mailing list > desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org -------- Ginn Chen Software Engineer, Browser Team Sun Microsystems, Inc. Phone: x82869 / +86-10-62673869 Fax: +86-10-62780969
