New significant speedups coming to FreeRunner

[Davide Scaini]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 7:23 PM, 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
>
>
ha ha, great work man!
I'll try it soon!
d
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