LCA 2008 Update on EXA/i965

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:33:26 -0700
exa, i965, intel, performance, xorg

I'm definitely overdue as far as posting an update on the progress of the work we've been doing to improve EXA performance for the i965 driver. And just yesterday, Benjamin Otte pointed out to me that it's really hard for many people to get any understanding at all about some of the work that's going on within the X.org development community.

Part of my reply to Benjamin was that there were a lot of excellent talks given at LCA this year, (Keith Packard, Dave Airlie, Adam Jackson, Jesse Barnes, Peter Hutterer, Eric Anholt, and myself were all there talking about X in one way or another). And that is true, but it's also true that many people were not able to attend LCA to hear those talks. And while the LCA conference kindly posts video of the talks that's not always the most desirable way of getting information when not at the conference in person.

So I think it would be fair to say that we've been doing a poor job of providing easy-to-find information about what's going on with X. I definitely want to help improve that, and I even just got an official designation to do exactly that. I was recently elected to the X.org Board of Directors and also assigned to chair a Communications committee whose job it is to help X.org communicate more effectively. What can we do better? Please email me with your ideas.

In the meantime, for my own part, I've just done a fairly thorough writeup of my LCA talk. That's something I've been wanting to get in the habit of doing for a while. One thing I can't stand is reading presentation slides that are almost content free---where clearly they weren't meant to stand alone but were meant to be accompanied by someone speaking for up to an hour. And I know I've been guilty of posting slides like that before. So this time, I've written some text that should stand alone quite well, (though, since I just wrote it today it might not correlate extremely well with what I said that day at LCA---but I've tried to address the same themes at least).