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