On Sun, Nov 6, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Jon Nettleton <jon.nettle...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi Jon, >> >> We are doing some forwards-planing with regards to the XO-1.75. Would >> you be able to tell us what kind of performance we can expect from the >> graphics driver that you are working on? Would it support 3D hardware >> acceleration? > > Well yes and no. The graphics hardware does support 3d acceleration, > however currently that is only supported via a binary driver. We also > don't have all the documentation nor man power to write a 3d driver. > The nouveau team has had 3 to 4 people working full time on a driver > for almost 4 years and their driver is just getting to a stable usage > point for desktop compositing.
nouveau has been very usable for quite some time. I was using it without issues back in F-12/13 timeframe without too many issues. > For a general idea of performance our 3d graphics hardware will run > Quake3 at native 1200x900 resolution with medium quality graphics at > about 30fps on average. > >> >> We are considering working to get GNOME 3 running, but for that to >> work well we'll need some good graphics capabilities. > > There should be a distinction between GNOME 3 and gnome-shell. > Gnome-shell is the only part of GNOME 3 that requires 3D acceleration. > Could our hardware run gnome-shell? Well that would take a bit of > time to figure out. To my knowledge nobody has shown gnome-shell > running with clutter utilizing the OpenGLES backend. Last I remember > clutter didn't support texture from pixmap capabilities with their EGL > backend, so that may still have to be implemented. This may have > changed in the last couple of months by I have definitely not seen it > demonstrated or talked about anywhere. That's not exactly entirely true. There's a number of other apps that are making using of clutter through clutter-gtk, clutter-gst or MX. totem is one of these for example. Also before long gnome is planning on deprecating non gnome-shell based UXs and concentrating on getting sofware rendering up to a reasonable speed. We can start testing this in F-17 as it'll be a feature [1]. Phoronix has more details on llvmpipe [2] and the gallium3D bits [3] > The bigger concern I have with targeting a compositing window manager > is the amount of RAM that it needs. Every window also has a > duplicated texture in memory that is used to create the composited > display. Generally gnome-shell will use 100+MB's of RAM just to > display the desktop, and there is no way to tweak around this by using > 16-bit colors as everything is an ARGB texture. On a machine with 1GB > of RAM this isn't so bad, but that is a hefty chunk of memory for a > machine with 512MB's of memory. Oh and that is just system RAM it > doesn't take into account the memory that is needed for the actual > graphics engine. Aren't the production 1.75s moving to 1Gb of RAM due to pricing of the different units? > To sum things up. Yes the hardware should have the capabilities to > run gnome-shell, again I say should as it is very untested. I would > not recommend targetting it's use in any future plans unless you have > GNOME and Xorg hackers lined up to spend a good chunk of time working > on it. Peter [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Gnome_shell_software_rendering [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAxMTI [3] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAwNTg _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel