<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Timo Jyrinki <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:timo.jyrinki@gmail.com">timo.jyrinki@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Hi,<br>
<br>
Just FYI to the community list, as slowness has been one of the<br>
biggest problems with Neo. Quite nice speedups are coming:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2010-January/010811.html" target="_blank">http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/openmoko-kernel/2010-January/010811.html</a><br>
(performance testing by Gennady Kupava)<br>
<br>
Apparently, and unfortunately, no-one had really questioned Om Inc:s<br>
(who mainly did the kernel work back in the days of the still mostly<br>
used 2.6.29) choices of kernel configuration. Disabling kernel debug<br>
features and pre-empt has resulted eg. these kind of improvements<br>
(from IRC, #openmoko-fi):<br>
- boot time 68.5% of original<br>
- "apt-cache search nano" 20s -> 14.8s<br>
- "emacs -f kill-emacs" 3.8s -> 2.2s<br>
<br>
These configuration changes are not yet in andy-tracking (the 2.6.29<br>
kernel still being used in most distros), I don't know what's the<br>
situation in the new om-2.6.32 branch. Together with the quite recent<br>
commit from Thomas White that doubled theoretical glamo speeds (in<br>
practice at least 20% in general), I feel that Neo FreeRunner is not<br>
anymore "terribly slow", but only "slow" by today's standards, which<br>
is quite an improvement. Especially after having been used to the<br>
"terribly slow" general behavior ;)<br>
<br>
Please tell if some distro happened to have those disabled already,<br>
and if someone knew about these speedups via the options already - and<br>
please arrange a commit to <a href="http://git.openmoko.org" target="_blank">git.openmoko.org</a> next time! Anyway, this<br>
all goes to show that in a project with limited resources like<br>
Openmoko, especially now that it's completely in the hands of the<br>
community when it comes to Neo FreeRunner development, you have to<br>
have the courage to question anything "suspicious" etc. you are<br>
seeing, not trusting that someone has actually optimized something to<br>
the extent assumed.<br>
<br>
If you want to have a quick grab of the new kernel for Debian (or any<br>
distro that loads uImage from a file), I put my compilation of kernel<br>
and modules to <a href="http://users.tkk.fi/~tajyrink/moko/kernel_20100108_nodebug_nopreempt/" target="_blank">http://users.tkk.fi/~tajyrink/moko/kernel_20100108_nodebug_nopreempt/</a><br>
<br>
-Timo, wishing everyone a speedier new year<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>ha ha, great work man!</div><div>I'll try it soon!</div><div>d</div></div>