Hi all,
In testing performance optimisations on various phones, I keep running
into an annoying hurdle.
Although you can optimise your Mir server/clients in such a way that
they're smoother more often, there's an additional variable outside of
Mir and Unity that gets in the way. That seems to be frequency scaling
done by the kernel. Sometimes on desktops too, but I'm mostly concerned
about phones here.
I find it suspicious that on some devices you can turn stuttering into
smoothness just but touching the screen a lot. But the smoothness soon
goes away when you're not touching the screen. In the extreme case, if
you're logged into the phone remotely you will also notice the system
can become unusably slow when the screen has turned off. That's useful
for a real phone's battery life, but it serves to illustrate that the
kernel is doing a lot behind the scenes. I'm more concerned about how
can we keep phone graphics performing as well as they do during touches,
even when we're not touching them?
- Daniel
