Wayland's Weston Gets Optimizations For Its Pixman Renderer

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 23 April 2018 at 07:31 AM EDT. 1 Comment
WAYLAND
Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations.

Fabien Lahoudere of Collabora posted a set of patches today to optimize the Pixman renderer for Weston. In particular, there are optimizations around compositing damage to the screen as well as optimizing the shadow buffer usage. The Weston Pixman renderer is often used as a software accelerated fallback in cases where no GPU hardware acceleration may be available. As implied by the name, it uses the long-standing Pixman library that is also used by Cairo, the X.Org Server, etc, for pixel manipulation on the CPU.

The damage compositing optimizations should drop the CPU usage about a half-percent or less for the system CPU usage while the shadow buffer optimizations improved the Weston CPU usage by 11~13% depending upon the configuration.

These optimization patches for now can be found on wayland-devel.
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