Re: DRI/DRM profiling for performance analysis?

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 09:15:18PM -0700, Eric Anholt wrote:

On Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:22:35 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik@iki.fi wrote:

...

Hello,

Do we currently have a method of profiling DRI/DRM drivers?

I was thinking that it would be interesting to:

1. Execute a benchmark, or some "timedemo" of a game
2. See how many times each dri/drm driver function is called, maybe top 20 most often called functions, and the total cpu time used for those functions.

So you could see that:

1. some function is called often, but it doesn't take much total cpu time.
2. some function is called just a couple of times, but it takes a lot of cpu time.

And everything in between.. would be good hints to use for optimizing the apps/drivers, and for comparison between different versions..

Does this make sense?

The tool to use is called "sysprof" and is ridiculously easy to use (on 32-bit x86). Click start, click stop, see where time was spent, go fix that.

Thanks!

That might make interesting addition to things like Phoronix benchmarks.. to compare the differences between driver versions.

-- Pasi