kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Jon Evans <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What I want to investigate first is how difficult it would be to subdivide
a zone into chunks that can be generated independently.  If this is done,
than the chunks can be done one after the other in a single-threaded world,
or split up between threads if threading is possible.  But, the key
advantage is that if you drag a track, you can just mark the chunks that
are near the action as dirty, and not need to regenerate the entire zone.

-Jon

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

> On 9/19/2017 9:53 AM, Simon Küppers wrote:
> > I agree with JP, however I see a chance for KiCad, where this feature
> > might work better than in other EDA packages.
> > I think the only way to get this feature to perform well is to use all
> > available processor cores.
> > Maybe it is enough to distribute all the zones to the processor cores.
> > However i do not know if the KiCad sources allow this kind of
> > multithreading.
>
> Multi-threading inside context switching.  That could be interesting!
>
> >
> > Best Regards
> >
> >
> > Am 2017-09-19 15:26, schrieb Jon Evans:
> >> Yes, I used Xpedition in a past life and one of my missions is to
> >> bring some of its cool features to KiCad :-)
> >>
> >> JP, I will do some tests on more complex boards and look in to
> >> possible solutions.
> >> I think this is quite a big challenge but want to take it on, because
> >> I think some of the underlying work needed will also be very useful
> >> for other things (like live DRC checking, autorouting, etc)
> >>
> >> -Jon
> >>
> >>> On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 8:35 AM, Clemens Koller <cko@xxxxxxxxx>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hello, Jon!
> >>>>
> >>>> Just for Reference: That's how Mentor Expedition is exposing
> >>>> dynamic plane generation:
> >>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6TskayF1Oc [1]
> >>>>
> >>>> I would be glad to test these things in Kicad...
> >>>>
> >>>> Regards,
> >>>>
> >>>> Clemens
> >>>>
> >>>> On 2017-09-19 02:18, Jon Evans wrote:
> >>>>> Hi all,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I've been wanting to take a look at live zone filling, as it's a
> >>>> really useful feature that some professional EDA tools have.  If
> >>>> zones refill in real time as you move things around, it's easy to
> >>>> make sure you leave enough space for your fill to succeed.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I made a quick patch to pcbnew showing this after an interactive
> >>>> trace move (see attached gif)
> >>>>> For this board and my computer, refilling is fast enough that
> >>>> this isn't a problem (I disabled the pop up window showing a
> >>>> progress bar for the "refill all zones" command).
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Can anyone point me to (or send me) some really complicated
> >>>> KiCad designs in terms of zone fills?  Do people have designs that
> >>>> take a while to fill even on recent computers?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> If I proposed this as a patch, I'd make it an option (disabled
> >>>> by default) in case it slows down old computers, but I think if
> >>>> zone filling for moderately complex boards still takes a while
> >>>> even on fast modern computers, we should look at optimizing it so
> >>>> that we can achieve real-time filling on modern computers.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Thanks,
> >>>>> Jon
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
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> >>>>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Links:
> >> ------
> >> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6TskayF1Oc
> >> [2] https://launchpad.net/~kicad-developers
> >> [3] https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
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> >
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