While better tools would always help, the key issue right now is not the absence of tools but the fact that the devs are working on making things work in the first place rather than performance-tuning them. If the tools were to magically appear I expect the devs would take them for a spin then go back to making things work for a while longer. Optimizing doesn't really make a lot of sense until the new components have stabilized some more.
Remember that the tools you are describing are probably larger than the open source drivers, so working on tools would take a *lot* of resources away from the driver work; it's not like the proprietary world where you're looking at 100K lines of code for the tools and >10M lines of code for the drivers. One thing we are going to look at for 2010 is the possibility of leveraging some of our proprietary driver tools for use with the open source drivers. No idea yet if that will turn out to be useful, but maybe something will come from it.
The point I was trying to make was that I doubt anyone can say which of those bottlenecks is most relevent to *your* application without doing exactly the kind of analysis work you are describing (which isn't a good use of time right now), and therefore it's hard to say *which* of the upcoming development tasks is going to make the most difference.
Remember that the tools you are describing are probably larger than the open source drivers, so working on tools would take a *lot* of resources away from the driver work; it's not like the proprietary world where you're looking at 100K lines of code for the tools and >10M lines of code for the drivers. One thing we are going to look at for 2010 is the possibility of leveraging some of our proprietary driver tools for use with the open source drivers. No idea yet if that will turn out to be useful, but maybe something will come from it.
The point I was trying to make was that I doubt anyone can say which of those bottlenecks is most relevent to *your* application without doing exactly the kind of analysis work you are describing (which isn't a good use of time right now), and therefore it's hard to say *which* of the upcoming development tasks is going to make the most difference.
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