OLPC upgrades

[Tiago Marques]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:34 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:03 PM,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> > Ok, what tools can I use to satisfy you of this 'opinion' that
> > applications start faster on either KDE or GNOME than on Sugar on the
> same
> > hardware.
> >
> > by the way, you are the first person I have heard dispute this.
>
> Erik has done a few things lately that made me change perspective.
> Most comparisons have been made against stuff running off the SD-card,
> and made our Sugar/Fedora look very slow in comparison. Everyone
> jumped on Python/Sugar.
>
> However, our NAND is *slow*, it busy-waits, JFFS2 is slow, and Linux
> under a bit of mem pressure (and having no swap) starts discarding
> pages, assuming that disk reads are reasonably fast and
> non-cpu-blocking. But reading pages from the NAND turns out to be slow
> and most importantly it pegs the CPU hard.
>
> Get the debxo or the vanilla fedoras running on the NAND. The
> performance delta is not what we thought it would be.

That's not exactly true. Most software that can be installed using yum(on
the NAND) runs fast. XFCE, for instance, takes some time to load the basic
desktop but then everything is mostly snappy enough and not memory starved.
That software is still not compiled for the Geode LX, which further slows it
down.
As you say, everything uses CPU on the Geode. Things like decompressing can
be made, probably, a lot faster just by using compiler optimizations. Has
this been considered in any way for future releases?
>From my professional experience, compiler optimizations can account for
10-30% (or more) free performance.
Best regards,
                         Tiago Marques


>
>
> cheers,
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
> _______________________________________________
> Devel mailing list
> Devel at lists.laptop.org
> http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20090207/5853dc25/attachment.html>