On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Ginn Chen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Nov 3, 2008, at 11:52 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote: > >> Joerg Schilling wrote: >>> >>> Ian Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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
Thanks to Alan for mentioning SPARC-Xorg. Ginn: If you want to do something for the SPARC-users, too, then Sun could simply decide to move the community contributed fox-gate SPARC changes upstream (SXCE and Sol10, not to mention 04.2009). Otherwise it would be silly (waste of resources on one site [mine!], lack of features [X11 extensions, performance] on the other). It is ready to use, would be a pity if nobody wanted it. Merge to server 1.5.2 is under way by X11 group. My changes are already in the process of being merged in locally (not yet in the public 1.5.2 gate due to a lack of time last week and a necessary cleanup of my local Blade 100 wspace). But the "old" 1.3 based gate is mostly ready for verification. The problem is, that Sun has no plans to use it, and therefore also no plans to verify anything. I mean, okay: It was my fault. I simply misunderstood Sun. One to two years, no prob. Was a joke. http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/fox/SPARC-Xorg/ %martin > >> >> >> - Virtually any graphics card on a PC of today is several generations >> newer >> than any SPARC graphics card you've used. >> >> -- >> -Alan Coopersmith- [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering >> >> _______________________________________________ >> desktop-discuss mailing list >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -------- > Ginn Chen > Software Engineer, Browser Team > Sun Microsystems, Inc. > Phone: x82869 / +86-10-62673869 > Fax: +86-10-62780969 > > > _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
