Dear Experts,
We are trying to solve an issue where we see at Android startup, each frame takes a long time to display i.e. frame rate is slow. With a debug enabled mali driver, we see that rendering is taking a long time compared to display - we can make this conclusion by analyzing the timestamps against malidp_adf_validate and malidp_adf_post traces.
The questions I have are;
1. In a typical v8 linaro kernel, does the software rendering engine refer to any particular clock input to configure its rate of schedule?
2. If not, presumably, there should be another way to configure the rate of rendering within the kernel as it is only logical that there should be a way to set that?
3. Or could it be that we be missing a clock entry in the device tree so the rendering engine is running at a default rate?
I realize I am giving limited information here but would really appreciate some input.
Kind Regards,
JC
Hi Pete,
Many thanks for your feedback, I have to go through it in detail.
With regard to my reference to "software rendering engine" basically, this platform has no dedicated hardware GPU so rendering is done in software and that is what I was referring to.
Would that affect anything you described above?
Hi JC,
I'm surprised Android really gets very far without a hardware GPU; there is some limited emulation of OpenGL ES 1.1 functionality in software for the UI, but in the newer versions more of the UI is using OpenGL ES 2.0 which requires GPU hardware to be present. And yes, emulation of OpenGL ES 1.1 in software is really really slow so if you are hitting this path then it wouldn't surprise me that your framerate is very low.
You can use something like DS-5 Streamline to profile your system and see where it is spending CPU time.
HTH,
Pete