MATISK: Benchmarking 1,000+ Revisions Of Mesa

This particular Mesa testing was carried out on an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook (the HP EliteBook) that Intel sent over to carry out per-commit driver benchmarking for them. Battening up the MATISK support is one of the final steps for getting some very interesting Sandy Bridge benchmarks going on a fully automated and constant manner.

The graphs included in this article are hard to interpret (and not all of the text is even presented in the PNG version), but the interactive SVG versions are easier to present and there are various Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org features for extracting the important information since the delta is more important than anything. User feedback is also appreciated for other ways to visualize such massive data sets.

Of the Mesa commits that were benchmarked, for those wondering about the two small performance changes during the 1,000+ tests, they were improvements made (newest commits are on the left of these graphs): "i965/gen6: Stream the VS push constants" and "i965/fs: Add initial support for 16-wide dispatch on gen6." This testing lasted more than one week, but was fully automated the entire time.

The MATISK implementation will be formally released with Phoronix Test Suite 3.4-Lillesand in September, but the current Git code and milestone snapshots already provide the development copy. Run phoronix-test-suite matisk.help for more information. On the following page is also a MATISK INI file template for those curious. Of course, this context-driven benchmarking -- driven by the Phoronix Test Suite -- works not only under Linux, but also Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and BSD operating systems too.