NoTiG
October 5th, 2005, 10:36 PM
The desktop performance issues cause me concern... so I have taken a particular interest into the various areas where speed improvements might be changing for the better for the average desktop user:
http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/
As part of the google summer of code project, one of the tasks set was to minimize or reduce gnomes start up time. After reading this article... it seems that perhaps the startup time for gnome itself can be reduced up to 50% with various "hacks" which may or may not become part of the tree by gnome 2.14
http://initng.thinktux.net/index.php/Main_Page
initng is a replacement of the systemv init which is the bootup process, and replaces it with a "parallel" boot to achieve faster booting times... much like the mac OS. According to many user reports... boot times are halved or reduced down to as low as 15 seconds , depending on your hardware ! When it matures, it is expected to make it into Dapper drake , possibly. (YES!)
http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1298.html
http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/gcc4/
THese two articles are sort of contradictory... but hopefully as gcc matures, it will compile programs to be more efficient and run faster.
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=102
I was kind of disappointed reading this article. One of the most popular apps is open office... and it is VERY slow to load, yet this guy proclaims that it is the kernel's fault. Things dont seem to be looking good for this program (correct me if im wrong)
http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html
Using 3D for the desktop is not just about making more eye candy. A lot of the 3D generated eye candy may just be glitz but there are also valid reasons for using 3D. 3D is simply faster than 2D, no one is making their 2D functions faster, all of silicon engineering is going into 3D. You can do fast, arbitrary image processing for things like color space conversion, stretching/warping, etc. I’ve seen some extremely complex filtering done in real time with shader hardware that would take the main CPU several seconds a frame to do. Support for heterogeneous window depths (simultaneous 8, 16, 24-bit windows) with arbitrary colormaps. On-the-fly screen flipping/rotation for projectors, and whole-screen scaling for the visual impaired, etc. Resolution independence allows objects to be rendered at arbitrary resolution/size and down/up-sampled when shown on-screen. More interesting applications are described later in the windowing section.
A few more points to touch:
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
GTK 2.8 and memory reduction . Right now infrastructure for advanced debugging has been integrated in gtk and glib 2.7.x. After 2.8 is released, reducing memory comsuption will be much easier.
The k7 kernel could end up replacing the deprecated 386 kernels resulting in speed increases. But how much of an improvement? and when?
Reiser 4
The state of the reiser 4 file system is not clear to me. I am not sure if it is being merged with the mainline kernel... but supposedly it benchmarks as the fastest file system. ALl it needs is a repacker module (defragment) . I have heard some issues with the Latency of this file system so I am not sure if the claims hold true. There is also another possibile option... which is to enable dir_index in the ext3 file system which could result in speed improvements. Perhaps it will be enabled in the future ?
http://www.gnome.org/~lcolitti/gnome-startup/analysis/
As part of the google summer of code project, one of the tasks set was to minimize or reduce gnomes start up time. After reading this article... it seems that perhaps the startup time for gnome itself can be reduced up to 50% with various "hacks" which may or may not become part of the tree by gnome 2.14
http://initng.thinktux.net/index.php/Main_Page
initng is a replacement of the systemv init which is the bootup process, and replaces it with a "parallel" boot to achieve faster booting times... much like the mac OS. According to many user reports... boot times are halved or reduced down to as low as 15 seconds , depending on your hardware ! When it matures, it is expected to make it into Dapper drake , possibly. (YES!)
http://www.drobe.co.uk/riscos/artifact1298.html
http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/gcc4/
THese two articles are sort of contradictory... but hopefully as gcc matures, it will compile programs to be more efficient and run faster.
http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=102
I was kind of disappointed reading this article. One of the most popular apps is open office... and it is VERY slow to load, yet this guy proclaims that it is the kernel's fault. Things dont seem to be looking good for this program (correct me if im wrong)
http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html
Using 3D for the desktop is not just about making more eye candy. A lot of the 3D generated eye candy may just be glitz but there are also valid reasons for using 3D. 3D is simply faster than 2D, no one is making their 2D functions faster, all of silicon engineering is going into 3D. You can do fast, arbitrary image processing for things like color space conversion, stretching/warping, etc. I’ve seen some extremely complex filtering done in real time with shader hardware that would take the main CPU several seconds a frame to do. Support for heterogeneous window depths (simultaneous 8, 16, 24-bit windows) with arbitrary colormaps. On-the-fly screen flipping/rotation for projectors, and whole-screen scaling for the visual impaired, etc. Resolution independence allows objects to be rendered at arbitrary resolution/size and down/up-sampled when shown on-screen. More interesting applications are described later in the windowing section.
A few more points to touch:
http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction
GTK 2.8 and memory reduction . Right now infrastructure for advanced debugging has been integrated in gtk and glib 2.7.x. After 2.8 is released, reducing memory comsuption will be much easier.
The k7 kernel could end up replacing the deprecated 386 kernels resulting in speed increases. But how much of an improvement? and when?
Reiser 4
The state of the reiser 4 file system is not clear to me. I am not sure if it is being merged with the mainline kernel... but supposedly it benchmarks as the fastest file system. ALl it needs is a repacker module (defragment) . I have heard some issues with the Latency of this file system so I am not sure if the claims hold true. There is also another possibile option... which is to enable dir_index in the ext3 file system which could result in speed improvements. Perhaps it will be enabled in the future ?