[indiana-discuss] [desktop-discuss] [osol-discuss] FF3 stability and performance concerns

[Ginn Chen]

On Nov 3, 2008, at 11:52 PM, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> Ian Collins <ian at ianshome.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That's an odd comment, considering most reviews of FF3 I've seen
>>> commends it for being both faster and leaking less memory tan its
>>> predecessor.
>>>
>>> It's certainly been stable long term on my desktop since 3.0.3.
>>>
>>
>> What is the last time you used it on Sparc?
>>
>> Netscape always was slower on sparc systems then on even slower x86  
>> machines.
>> I would guess that there is strange byte order dependent code  
>> inside the
>> graphics engine.
>
> I don't know of any "strange byte order dependent code" in the Cairo  
> graphics
> engine used in current Firefox, but I do know of several simpler  
> reasons it's
> faster on x86 than SPARC:
>
> - it makes heavy use of the Render extension if the X server  
> supports it.
>   Xorg supports Render on almost all cards, with several providing  
> hardware
>   acceleration for it, which helps x86.   On SPARC, only a few  
> drivers for
>   Xsun were updated to add Render support, and it's off by default.   
> For Xorg,
>   unless you've added Martin's drivers, only XVR-2500 has a Xorg  
> driver
>   provided so far - and I don't know what level of Render  
> acceleration any
>   of those provide.
>
> - The pixman backend used for various graphics rendering has code  
> for MMX & SSE
>   acceleration, but none for VIS.   Given the upstream projects'  
> target
>   audience are approximately 99% x86 and 0% SPARC, they've  
> concentrated their
>   optimization efforts there.

Currently on Solaris, libpixman in system cairo or Firefox doesn't  
build with MMX & SSE
acceleration, that is something we can improve for x86.

Ginn

>
>
> - Virtually any graphics card on a PC of today is several  
> generations newer
>   than any SPARC graphics card you've used.
>
> -- 
> 	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
> 	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
>
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> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org

--------
Ginn Chen
Software Engineer, Browser Team
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Phone: x82869 / +86-10-62673869
Fax: +86-10-62780969