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authorBrian Paul <brian.paul@tungstengraphics.com>1999-02-23 03:41:13 +0000
committerBrian Paul <brian.paul@tungstengraphics.com>1999-02-23 03:41:13 +0000
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+
+ Mesa 3.0 MITS Information
+
+
+This software is distributed under the terms of the GNU Library
+General Public License, see the LICENSE file for details.
+
+
+This document is a preliminary introduction to help you get
+started. For more detaile information consult the web page.
+
+http://10-dencies.zkm.de/~mesa/
+
+
+
+Version 0.1 (Yes it's very alpha code so be warned!)
+Contributors:
+ Emil Briggs (briggs@bucky.physics.ncsu.edu)
+ David Bucciarelli (tech.hmw@plus.it)
+ Andreas Schiffler (schiffler@zkm.de)
+
+
+
+1. Requirements:
+ Mesa 3.0.
+ An SMP capable machine running Linux 2.x
+ libpthread installed on your machine.
+
+
+2. What does MITS stand for?
+ MITS stands for Mesa Internal Threading System. By adding
+ internal threading to Mesa it should be possible to improve
+ performance of OpenGL applications on SMP machines.
+
+
+3. Do applications have to be recoded to take advantage of MITS?
+ No. The threading is internal to Mesa and transparent to
+ applications.
+
+
+4. Will all applications benefit from the current implementation of MITS?
+ No. This implementation splits the processing of the vertex buffer
+ over two threads. There is a certain amount of overhead involved
+ with the thread synchronization and if there is not enough work
+ to be done the extra overhead outweighs any speedup from using
+ dual processors. You will not for example see any speedup when
+ running Quake because it uses GL_POLYGON and there is only one
+ polygon for each vertex buffer processed. Test results on a
+ dual 200 Mhz. Pentium Pro system show that one needs around
+ 100-200 vertices in the vertex buffer before any there is any
+ appreciable benefit from the threading.
+
+
+5. Are there any parameters that I can tune to try to improve performance.
+ Yes. You can try to vary the size of the vertex buffer which is
+ define in VB_MAX located in the file src/vb.h from your top level
+ Mesa distribution. The number needs to be a multiple of 12 and
+ the optimum value will probably depend on the capabilities of
+ your machine and the particular application you are running.
+
+
+6. Are there any ways I can modify the application to improve its
+ performance with the MITS?
+ Yes. Try to use as many vertices between each Begin/End pair
+ as possbile. This will reduce the thread synchronization
+ overhead.
+
+
+7. What sort of speedups can I expect?
+ On some benchmarks performance gains of up to 30% have been
+ observerd. Others may see no gain at all and in a few rare
+ cases even some degradation.
+
+
+8. What still needs to be done?
+ Lots of testing and benchmarking.
+ A portable implementation that works within the Mesa thread API.
+ Threading of additional areas of Mesa to improve performance
+ even more.
+
+
+
+Installation:
+
+ 1. This assumes that you already have a working Mesa 3.0 installation
+ from source.
+ 2. Place the tarball MITS.tar.gz in your top level Mesa directory.
+ 3. Unzip it and untar it. It will replace the following files in
+ your Mesa source tree so back them up if you want to save them.
+
+
+ README.MITS
+ Make-config
+ Makefile
+ mklib.glide
+ src/vbxform.c
+ src/vb.h
+
+ 4. Rebuild Mesa using the command
+
+ make linux-386-glide-mits
+