why openmoko is so slow? Is it a joke?

mobi phil mobi at mobiphil.com
Mon Jul 13 16:02:38 CEST 2009


Hello all

I spent this weekend some time to compare and to try to understand what is
slow, why is openmoko slow... At least concerning the display I came to the
concusion that X windows is/should not too much to blame.

I installed the latest SHR distro on a mSD card, and run it both on
Freerunner and ETEN glofiish M800, thanks to the gnufiish project. I have to
say that everything on eten m800 is much faster, rendering, screen refresh,
scrolling etc. However both devices have the same processor at the sam
speed, andsame SD card. I run both x11perf, and a little program to draw
rectangles on the framebuffer. The speed ratio between the openmoko and eten
m800 framebuffer is 7/10, this measured with my small tool. I run "x11perf
-all" on the ETEN M800 with the Xfbdev, you will find the results attached.
I tried to run x11pref -all on freerunner with Xfbdev but it crashes at the
beginning of the second test... I will try to run the same

here the comparison of the first test (Dot)
for gnufiish


  6000000 reps @   0.0009 msec (1120000.0/sec): Dot
  6000000 reps @   0.0009 msec (1130000.0/sec): Dot
  6000000 reps @   0.0009 msec (1120000.0/sec): Dot
  6000000 reps @   0.0009 msec (1120000.0/sec): Dot
  6000000 reps @   0.0009 msec (1130000.0/sec): Dot
  30000000 trep @   0.0009 msec (1120000.0/sec): Dot

for freerunner..

  2000000 reps @   0.0025 msec (394000.0/sec): Dot
  2000000 reps @   0.0025 msec (402000.0/sec): Dot
  2000000 reps @   0.0025 msec (393000.0/sec): Dot
  2000000 reps @   0.0028 msec (360000.0/sec): Dot
  2000000 reps @   0.0026 msec (391000.0/sec): Dot
  10000000 trep @   0.0026 msec (388000.0/sec): Dot

so, you can see the differences between the numbers... However I am a bit
confused, and need to read once more the manpage to know exactly how to
interpret the numbers, but at first glance, there is a huge difference...

As I said, I wil try to run the x11perf on the Xglamo to see if there are
any improvement... However I am not sure that the acceleration would solve
the problem... I think that the bottleneck is the data bus, or? the story
with the SDcard connected to the glamo chip...

So... my question is ... is it a joke that the openmoko framebuffer is so
slow compared to other similar phones??? In this case I would really advice
people to refrain in buying the openmoko, and better go for glofiish M800,
that has a keyboard and radio as plus, and kernel support is almost ready...
Again, on M800 SHR is really fluid... However loading applications is
slow... Maybe libraries are not cached well?
                                         |


rgrds,
mobi phil

being mobile, but including technology
http://mobiphil.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.openmoko.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20090713/3cebe5ea/attachment.htm 


More information about the devel mailing list