XO-1.75 relative performance

[Jon Nettleton]

>
> nouveau has been very usable for quite some time. I was using it
> without issues back in F-12/13 timeframe without too many issues.

What have you been using it for? Gnome-shell didn't exist back then.
They have been incrementally adding features but it has taken time.  I
have never used nouveau because there has been no power control
features, not something we I can do without.  I am not trying to say
something negative on the project, I just think it is a good barometer
for people to realistically grasp how long it takes to mature modern
graphics drivers without documentation.

>>
>> There should be a distinction between GNOME 3 and gnome-shell.
>> Gnome-shell is the only part of GNOME 3 that requires 3D acceleration.
>>  Could our hardware run gnome-shell?  Well that would take a bit of
>> time to figure out.  To my knowledge nobody has shown gnome-shell
>> running with clutter utilizing the OpenGLES backend.  Last I remember
>> clutter didn't support texture from pixmap capabilities with their EGL
>> backend, so that may still have to be implemented.  This may have
>> changed in the last couple of months by I have definitely not seen it
>> demonstrated or talked about anywhere.
>
> That's not exactly entirely true. There's a number of other apps that
> are making using of clutter through clutter-gtk, clutter-gst or MX.
> totem is one of these for example. Also before long gnome is planning
> on deprecating non gnome-shell based UXs and concentrating on getting
> sofware rendering up to a reasonable speed. We can start testing this
> in F-17 as it'll be a feature [1]. Phoronix has more details on
> llvmpipe [2] and the gallium3D bits [3]

Is this argument for or against GNOME 3?  You point out a lot of
libraries that require clutter, but none that are hard dependencies of
GNOME.  I understand a lot of projects are dependant on clutter, but
none are hard dependencies of the GNOME project.

The use of software rendering via llvm is great, but unfortunately
that is targeted at modern multi-core processors that have cycles to
spare.  This does not target at the limited resources an XO has
available.

>> Oh and that is just system RAM it
>> doesn't take into account the memory that is needed for the actual
>> graphics engine.
>
> Aren't the production 1.75s moving to 1Gb of RAM due to pricing of the
> different units?

Not that I have heard but we will see.  Regardless I don't see any
justification that would suggest we should target gnome-shell as a
desktop.

I understand the push to proliferate GNOME, however as Linus and many
other GNOME expatriates have emphasized it is not the right fit for
everyone.   I have been a gnome-shell contributor and propenent from
early on, but I can' t suggest it is a good alternative for limited
resource computers, when it continually fails me on my quad-core
desktop with a top of the line video card, which I originally ran the
nouveau drivers on but had to switch to the binary nvidia drivers
because it ran the fan at 100% the entire time.

-Jon