923012 - Performance issues (slow fps) on Peak compared to Keon

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: General, defect, P4)

Description

[Mihnea Dobrescu-Balaur (:mihneadb)]

Phone type (Keon, Peak, other): Peak
OS version (Settings>Device information>More information>): 1.1 (tried also with 1.0 and 1.2
Build Identifier (...>More information>): 
Update channel (...>More information>): daily

I've been playing with both the Keon and the Peak as daily phones and I can't help but notice how much slower the Peak is compared to the Keon. This is unexpected considering the hardware specs difference between the two (you'd expect the opposite).

An easy example is - opening an app and pressing the home button. On Keon both animations (loading and "quitting" the app) are smooth, while on the Peak they basically show a few frames, really laggy.

I asked around on IRC and I was told there is / might be some problem with the GPU driver on the Peak.

Comment 1

[Sotaro Ikeda [:sotaro]]

Performance problems seems to come from driver level. Peak had a performance problem in b2g v1.2. It caused by gralloc buffer performance. Therefor gralloc buffer is disable on peak since b2g v1.2. The gralloc buffer performance problem caused by gecko is already fixed. Therefore it might be better to enable gralloc buffer again on peak.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/layers/ipc/ShadowLayerUtilsGralloc.cpp#382

Comment 2

[Geeksphone]

Agree with Sotaro, we tested that gralloc buffer enabled works correctly on v1.2, please enable it.

Comment 3

[Mossroy]

I also have a Peak and a Keon device. Both are using stable 1.1 version from Geeksphone
I face similar slowdowns on the Peak device : https://forum.geeksphone.com/index.php?topic=5861.0
I don't have them on the Keon device, at all

Comment 4

[Mossroy]

With Peak and Keon upgraded to 1.3 daily (from Geeksphone), I see the same performance difference.
Manually enabling Hardware composition in the developer settings of the Peak does not make any difference (or, at least, I did not notice it)

Comment 5

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

(In reply to Mossroy from comment #4)
> With Peak and Keon upgraded to 1.3 daily (from Geeksphone), I see the same
> performance difference.
> Manually enabling Hardware composition in the developer settings of the Peak
> does not make any difference (or, at least, I did not notice it)

Same problem here: graphics performance on my Peak used to be *really* sluggish and I was using the master build. The problem went away a couple of weeks ago on master and now it's on par with the Keon again. I suggest asking on the Geeksphone forum if the change that fixed this performance regression will be backported to 1.3 if you want to stay on that version.

Comment 6

[Mossroy]

Maybe it's because of the kernel optimizations from https://github.com/gp-b2g/gp-peak-kernel/commit/f02b7a6f10b257b0452d3de47e19e55836e57613 ?

There are no git branches on this kernel so maybe backporting to 1.3 would "simply" mean deploy the same kernel version on 1.3?
I might try by myself : would it be safe to flash the boot.img from nightly on my Peak (which uses b2g 1.3)? (safe in the sense that, if anything goes wrong, I can flash the normal boot.img with the flash.sh script of http://downloads.geeksphone.com/ zips?)

Comment 7

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

(In reply to Mossroy from comment #6)
> Maybe it's because of the kernel optimizations from
> https://github.com/gp-b2g/gp-peak-kernel/commit/
> f02b7a6f10b257b0452d3de47e19e55836e57613 ?

I don't think it was a kernel change, it's more likely something to do with the OpenGL driver or the hardware compositor.

> There are no git branches on this kernel so maybe backporting to 1.3 would
> "simply" mean deploy the same kernel version on 1.3?
> I might try by myself : would it be safe to flash the boot.img from nightly
> on my Peak (which uses b2g 1.3)? (safe in the sense that, if anything goes
> wrong, I can flash the normal boot.img with the flash.sh script of
> http://downloads.geeksphone.com/ zips?)

Yes, as long as fastboot works you can flash any partitions you'd like. Worst case you'll get a non-booting phone but then it would be just a matter to manually boot it into fastboot mode to re-flash it to a working configuration.

Comment 8

[Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto]]

I'm going to close this as WORKSFORME because my Peak's been performing fine. Please reopen if you encounter this issue again.