New significant speedups coming to FreeRunner

[Denis Johnson]

Good work,

Do I only need the .bin or the config and modules also. I have tried
just the .bin using qtMoko v16 image and it boots quite quickly to qt
ui then cycles to black screen with blinking cursor then after some
time back to qt screen then back to black screen. etc

cheers Denis

On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 4:23 AM, Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Just FYI to the community list, as slowness has been one of the
> biggest problems with Neo. Quite nice speedups are coming:
>
> http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2010-January/010811.html
> (performance testing by Gennady Kupava)
>
> Apparently, and unfortunately, no-one had really questioned Om Inc:s
> (who mainly did the kernel work back in the days of the still mostly
> used 2.6.29) choices of kernel configuration. Disabling kernel debug
> features and pre-empt has resulted eg. these kind of improvements
> (from IRC, #openmoko-fi):
> - boot time 68.5% of original
> - "apt-cache search nano" 20s -> 14.8s
> - "emacs -f kill-emacs" 3.8s -> 2.2s
>
> These configuration changes are not yet in andy-tracking (the 2.6.29
> kernel still being used in most distros), I don't know what's the
> situation in the new om-2.6.32 branch. Together with the quite recent
> commit from Thomas White that doubled theoretical glamo speeds (in
> practice at least 20% in general), I feel that Neo FreeRunner is not
> anymore "terribly slow", but only "slow" by today's standards, which
> is quite an improvement. Especially after having been used to the
> "terribly slow" general behavior ;)
>
> Please tell if some distro happened to have those disabled already,
> and if someone knew about these speedups via the options already - and
> please arrange a commit to git.openmoko.org next time! Anyway, this
> all goes to show that in a project with limited resources like
> Openmoko, especially now that it's completely in the hands of the
> community when it comes to Neo FreeRunner development, you have to
> have the courage to question anything "suspicious" etc. you are
> seeing, not trusting that someone has actually optimized something to
> the extent assumed.
>
> If you want to have a quick grab of the new kernel for Debian (or any
> distro that loads uImage from a file), I put my compilation of kernel
> and modules to http://users.tkk.fi/~tajyrink/moko/kernel_20100108_nodebug_nopreempt/
>
> -Timo, wishing everyone a speedier new year
>
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