"Mega Drivers" Being Proposed For A Faster Mesa

[Sergey Shambir]

6% performance improvement across the board? Sounds like the next step. What does this mean for out-of-tree Direct3D and CUDA state trackers?

Seems that it's only when hardware acceleration disabled (see INTEL_NO_HW=1 in article). If so, perfomance grow should be lesser in normal situation, i.e when acceleration enabled.

[Calinou]

the performace gain from this seems to be very small, but yah every bit helps.
the time for CD distros is over go with a dvd, no one uses it anyway they use a usb :P

Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Mint can't be put a CD already since a few months ago.

[erendorn]

Error in same order of magnitude as the results? We call it insignificant (or nothing).

I also can't understand those trailing digits (these after 0.7 in -0.798709%) if we have an error of 0.3%. they absolutely don't have any value or meaning.

The results look significant to me at alpha=5% (non null hypothesis).

[marvin42]

only for classic drivers

libdricore is only used by classic mesa drivers (mainly only intel chips). Gallium drivers are not affected.

[arashbm]

-0.798709% +/- 0.333703%

Error in same order of magnitude as the results? We call it insignificant (or nothing).

I also can't understand those trailing digits (these after 0.7 in -0.798709%) if we have an error of 0.3%. they absolutely don't have any value or meaning.

[Nille]

USB? Who installs using those? TFTP/PXE/NFS is where it's at!

I bet that 99% of all Home users never heard from TFTP/PXE/NFS. The Big Problem is that the most routers can't ship an tftp server ip with dhcp.

[Serge]

the performace gain from this seems to be very small, but yah every bit helps.
the time for CD distros is over go with a dvd, no one uses it anyway they use a usb :P

USB? Who installs using those? TFTP/PXE/NFS is where it's at!

[ethana2]

6% performance improvement across the board? Sounds like the next step. What does this mean for out-of-tree Direct3D and CUDA state trackers?

[jrch2k8]

this can be good as you can easily work bugs out (Like in the Linux Kernal) but hmm? i see a few things that can go bad doing it this way the major one is ptaches

as mrugiero stated this a compilation angle things and not code related beyond the fixes needed to make it compile, this technique will allow better runtime performance since the symbol lookup tables get greatly reduced and could help to reduce it more making public only those symbols really needed instead of expose mesa internal symbols.

additional side effects is protecting mesa internal could reduce the surface of action of an potential security attack in some obscure scenarios

[mrugiero]

this can be good as you can easily work bugs out (Like in the Linux Kernal) but hmm? i see a few things that can go bad doing it this way the major one is ptaches

I don't think this is supposed to actually unify the code, but instead it just changes a few things to be able to build all of mesa as a single object, and then makes some changes on which symbols are exported and which symbols are just for mesa.