Graphic acceleration on Yeeloong anyone?

[s.bou...@free.fr]

Hi,

We managed to get the graphical desktop working in Debian/Wheezy,
thanks to the upgrade of
xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion_1.7.6-1loongson_mipsel.deb from [1].

Does anyone got the graphic hardware acceleration working?

My understanding is that the siliconmotion driver is supposed
to enable the hardware acceleration. As a matter of fact, I got a
poor result on the FFU FPT benchmark - assuming it may be used as a
performance indicator - run from within hardinfo

rgds
samy

[1] http://www.anheng.com.cn/loongson2f/wheezy/xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion
/

[Roman Mamedov]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:03:55 -0800
Matt Turner <matt...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 4:19 AM, s.bou...@free.fr <s.bou...@free.fr> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We managed to get the graphical desktop working in Debian/Wheezy,
> > thanks to the upgrade of
> > xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion_1.7.6-1loongson_mipsel.deb from [1].

What you mean is: we finally gave up on fixing this in Debian and decided to
just direct everyone to use the Anheng repo packages, which btw are available
since ages ago, and howto on that [1] was published by me in March-2011.

Not that this is particularly bad, just for some factual correctness. :)

[1] http://romanrm.ru/en/loongson/siliconmotion

> But I've never tried my pixman code with o32 and frankly don't care if
> it works at all because it's complete nonsense to care about
> performance and also use o32. Advice #2: don't use an o32-ABI
> distribution if you care about performance. Gentoo has n32/multilib
> stage4s with pre-built Xfce available on our mirrors in
> /experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f/

My benchmarks of Debian O32 vs Parabola N32 have shown a difference of about 8%
in the very best case in favor of Parabola.

The N32 experimental port of Debian [2] is defunct since a long time ago. And
8% was way far from being enough to justify switching distros from the familiar
Debian for me.

[2]
http://sandyleo26.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/gsoc-proposal-creating-a-new-mips-n32-abi-port-for-debian/

As for Gentoo, I don't know, is there even a way to use it on the Yeeloong
without having to personally compile every singly package you install?
Because that's certainly not what I would want to do on a slow netbook.

--
With respect,
Roman

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Stallman had a printer,
with code he could not see.
So he began to tinker,
and set the software free."

[Matt Turner]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 4:19 AM, s.bou...@free.fr <s.bou...@free.fr> wrote:

The chip doesn't support many useful hardware acceleration features to
begin with, and XAA (an old acceleration architecture that sort of
accelerated things, sometimes) has since been removed from new X
servers.

The best thing you can do for graphical performance is to use pixman
with Loongson optimizations. See
http://mattst88.com/blog/2012/05/17/Optimizing_pixman_for_Loongson:_Process_and_Results/
for benchmark numbers. Since that article was published, more work was
done which improves web rendering performance. Use pixman-0.28.0.

[Mart Raudsepp]

On N, 1970-01-01 at 00:00 +0000, Roman Mamedov wrote:
>
> As for Gentoo, I don't know, is there even a way to use it on the
> Yeeloong
> without having to personally compile every singly package you install?
> Because that's certainly not what I would want to do on a slow
> netbook.

As Matt already told in your quoted text (I don't have his original mail
in my box yet):

> Gentoo has n32/multilib
> stage4s with pre-built Xfce available on our mirrors in
> /experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f/

So you can have a fully-fledged XFCE4 desktop image as a starting point
and add on what you need, and gradually upgrade things to newer versions
when you can afford some CPU usage. It's not THAT slow really,
definitely not as slow as the 166MHz computers I started out with on
Gentoo :)

Also, pixman and the likes is where it becomes interesting for
performance. Matt's optimizations for using the loongson multimedia
instruction set on loongson2f (which is very similar to MMX) for greater
software graphics performance, etc.

Now if someone would figure out any graphics driver caused slowness and
fix that, it'd be nice. It could probably do a lot better easily, but
with XAA performance regressed in xserver and by now outright removed,
it's probably a very sad story with EXA, while it could be made to at
least not be slower than pure software which I suspect it is. You
essentially WANT everything to be pure software on that "GPU" without
EXA or XAA trying to accelerate, but not just straight NoAccel option as
you'd then lose Xvideo too.

Someone maybe could test how it is these days for 2D graphics
performance with cairo-perf benchmarks suite with NoAccel and without
it.

But the bottom-line is - for graphics performance on yeeloong with its
very old awful SMI 2D-silicon without alpha compsiting graphics you can
really only accelerate with pixman in software, and make sure graphics
driver doesn't decelerate by moving pixmaps around a lot for the very
few things that can be accelerated, as that highly offsets any potential
gains.

Unfortunately while my expertise could allow to see what can be improved
and do so, I haven't had any unpaid free hobby time for that.
NoAccel comparisons could be interesting, to see if driver gets in the
way.


Best,
Mart Raudsepp

[Anthony G. Basile]

On 11/21/2012 03:20 PM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
> As for Gentoo, I don't know, is there even a way to use it on the
> Yeeloong without having to personally compile every singly package you
> install? Because that's certainly not what I would want to do on a
> slow netbook.

Heh, I did it for you guys. Look on any gentoo mirror, eg

http://mirrors.rit.edu/gentoo/experimental/mips/desktop-loongson2f/

Instructions for installation are at

http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/mips/yeeloong.xml

I have two images up. One called vanilla and one hardened. Both are
full XFCE4 desktops, "grown" from an earlier stage 3 that Matt Turner
built. They have ABI=o32, n32 and n64. The hardened one uses the
compile we work with in hardened gentoo and it turns on ssp, pie,
_FORTIFY_SOURCES=2, bind now and relro by default. The vanilla does
not. The hardened is slower than the vanilla by just a little bit (I
tested that) but I did not test o32 vs n32 vs n64.

I'd be very interested in seeing benchmarking.

BTW, new images are going to go up soon that 1) have updated packages,
and 2) the kernel allows you to create a separate /boot formated ext3
and frees up / for any format you want.

--Tony Basile <blue...@gentoo.org>

[s.bou...@free.fr]

Thanks you Matt, Mart, Anthony, Roman & all!

On this hardware, graphic hardware acceleration is not on the top of the
priorities, for the most of us, I presume.

This said, let's see what improvment the new 8133 laptop by Lemote will
offer. Its radeon HD 3200 GPU is embedded in a AMD RS780 chipset.

Regards
Samy

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

The freedom fans don't like much the ati blobs though, iiuc.

[s.bou...@free.fr]

> This said, let's see what improvment the new 8133 laptop by Lemote will
> offer. Its radeon HD 3200 GPU is embedded in a AMD RS780 chipset.

The freedom fans don't like much the ati blobs though, iiuc.

What about this xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz ?
Found in:

http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/3aXorg/

[Lluís Batlle i Rossell]

On Thu, Nov 22, 2012 at 03:04:54AM -0800, s.bou...@free.fr wrote:
>
>
> > This said, let's see what improvment the new 8133 laptop by Lemote will
> > > offer. Its radeon HD 3200 GPU is embedded in a AMD RS780 chipset.
> >
> > The freedom fans don't like much the ati blobs though, iiuc.
> >
>

> What about this xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz<http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/3aXorg/xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd_1.3.0.orig.tar.gz>?
> Found in:
>
> http://www.loongson.cn/dev/ftp/3aXorg/
>

That sounds very good. Somewhere I heard it requires blobs, and I was just
trying to trigger this your answer :) Thank you!

[Matt Turner]

Their loss for not being able to use a bit of microcode that handles a
ring buffer.