OpenWrt is now able to run applications based on toolkit GTK+ on top of DirectFB!
Using DirectFB avoids having a full blown X11-server (most times Xorg) running, but having the possibiliy of getting nice GTK2 widgets onto your display without altering applications which are using the toolkit.
I was quite happy I got that working, because unfortunately DirectFB-support on part of gtk2 is quite broken in most versions.
Due its incredible slowness of GTK2 on the Openmoko Freerunner (400 MHz ARM, 128 MB RAM) I didn’t expect much of gtk2 on top of DirectFB.
Surprisingly, a simple gtk2 app runs quite well and responsive on my Ben NanoNote by qi-hardware (366 MHz mips, 32 MB RAM).
I was curious and started some benchmarking with the gtk2 performance testing tool “gtkperf”. However I had to patch gtkperf that it’ll be usable with the qvga-resolution on the Ben NanoNote (otherwise parts of the app were hidden and the benchmark will get falsified because not the whole gets redrawed).
Do not compare your results of an original version of gtkperf with mine – varieties may be caused due to mentioned changes! (Patch: http://nanl.de/files/patches/gtkperf/gtkperf-adjust-layout.patch)
What got tested?
gtkperf using GTK2 on:
- Openmoko Freerunner with DirectFB
- Openmoko Freerunner with Xorg and glamo driver
- Openmoko Freerunner with Xorg and fbdev driver
- qi-hardware Ben NanoNote with DirectFB
- qi-hardware Ben NanoNote with Xorg and fbdev driver (not yet done)
| 1 | 2 | |
| GtkEntry – time: 0.91 GtkComboBox – time: 16.01 GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 10.18 GtkSpinButton – time: 2.37 GtkProgressBar – time: 1.04 GtkToggleButton – time: 2.54 GtkCheckButton – time: 1.72 GtkRadioButton – time: 4.16 GtkTextView – Add text – time: 9.47 |
GtkEntry – time: 2.08 GtkComboBox – time: 30.40 GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 21.65 GtkSpinButton – time: 3.54 GtkProgressBar – time: 2.55 GtkToggleButton – time: 4.66 GtkCheckButton – time: 2.71 GtkRadioButton – time: 6.64 GtkTextView – Add text – time: 26.06 |
|
| 3 | 4 | |
| GtkEntry – time: 1.73 GtkComboBox – time: 22.70 GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 16.52 GtkSpinButton – time: 2.60 GtkProgressBar – time: 1.93 GtkToggleButton – time: 3.60 GtkCheckButton – time: 2.28 GtkRadioButton – time: 5.73 GtkTextView – Add text – time: 18.81 |
GtkEntry – time: 1.07 GtkComboBox – time: 18.61 GtkComboBoxEntry – time: 10.98 GtkSpinButton – time: 2.81 GtkProgressBar – time: 1.51 GtkToggleButton – time: 4.31 GtkCheckButton – time: 2.60 GtkRadioButton – time: 7.42 GtkTextView – Add text – time: 12.48 |
The results are really interesting!
On the Openmoko GTA02 (Freerunner) GTK on DirectFB seems to be almost twice as fast as GTK on top of Xorg!
Even though the Hardware of the Ben NanoNote is quite limited compared to the GTA02, the benchmark looks quite promising and GTK2-applications seem to be – unline I expected – really usable on that kind of limited hardware.
What’s really confusing to me: running gtkperf on top of the accelerated Xorg-glamo driver for the glamo graphics chip is slower than using the not accelerated Xorg-fbdev driver. However this myth should not be part of this article; I’ll get in touch with Lars – the author of Xorg-glamo – regarding this issue.
UPDATE: Lars told me this is related to the glamo-overhead. Data transferred to the framebuffer via fbdev only consists of pure pixmap-data. Data transferred via the glamo-driver consists of data AND special glamo-related commands (telling the chip what to accelerate) which results in more data to be transferred. Normally this shouldn’t cause such a discrepancy, however the glamo memory-onnection is a bottleneck and only capable of tansferring around 4 MB / second which slows down unacceleraed content. The glamo chip provides the interface for the SD-card, so the whole bus is shared by graphics- and SD-carc-traffic. That’s the reason why e.g. playing videos (unaccelerated) stored on SD-card is that damn slow!
Further tests, benchmarks, evaluation coming soon…
Versions:
gtkperf: 0.40 (with patch: http://nanl.de/files/patches/gtkperf/gtkperf-adjust-layout.patch)
DirectFB: 1.4
GTK+: 2.17.0
cairo: 1.8.6
pango:1.26.0
freetype: 2.3.9
glib: 2.22.2
atk: 1.22.0
pixman: 0.14.0
Xorg X11 server: X11R7.4-1.5.1
xorg-driver-glamo: b45d78c927715b8814404fc2a34ae0aa1d003c29