GLAMOR Patch Bomb Can Boost Some Operations By 700~800%

Eric Anholt at Intel OTC continues investing great amounts of time recently on improving the GLAMOR acceleration code that was merged into the X.Org Server for speeding up 2D acceleration using OpenGL. Eric is out this week with a set of 27 patches for review pertaining to this code.

Eric has been pushing out a lot of GLAMOR code lately for improving the server-based GLAMOR implementation (as opposed to the standalone GLAMOR library) that will premiere with X.Org Server 1.16 this summer. While there's been many sets of patches published, on Tuesday he posted a "patch bomb" for review, or all of his code in one big series for review so that Keith Packard can get the changes merged into the xorg-server code-base.

This patch bomb offers performance improvements, overflow errors, code clean-ups, and also test-case fixes. One of the patches improves the GLAMOR-based PushPixels performance to make a very big difference, "Improves x11perf -f8text by 759.373% +/- 3.33096% (n=166)." There was also a similarly big performance win for PolyGlyphBlt, "Improves performance of x11perf -f8text by 773.389% +/- 3.50754% (n=10)." Another patch improved the performance of line fall-backs also by an even wider margin, "Improves x11perf -seg100 by 863.652% +/- 9.8968% (n=5)."

It will be very interesting to see these GLAMOR performance improvements land in X.Org Server 1.16 since GLAMOR's current performance is quite poor. For Intel's driver GLAMOR is just an optional alternative to using the faster SNA or UXA acceleration methods but on the AMD side for the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer, RadeonSI GLAMOR is the only option. The current thinking amongst X.Org developers is that xorg-server 1.16 will be released in July.