[cairo] Re: Making Cairo friendlier for embedded use

[Leon Woestenberg]

Hello all,


good to see there is interest in using Cairo (and friends) to embedded 
platforms. Maybe we should first define what our goals are exactly and 
then see if we can work together on them?

I will draft up an initial collection of stuff I have seen on the list.

Damian Dixon wrote:

> I've also been lurking on the list.
> 
> I do embedded development on quite low powered ARM and PowerPC systems
> so floating point can quickly become an issue.
> 
I assume that "low powered" means having no FPU then, instead of the
wattage your targets are consuming :-)

> We only use GTK+ for raster drawing rather then anything else so I am
> not concerned too much with GTK+ using floating point arithmetic (via
> Cario).
> 
> Currently Cario does not give us the performance we require, though I
> continue to lurk as the glitz backend is of interest to us as we
> currently mix X11/Win32 and OpenGL/DirectX and Cario would potentially
> allow us to reduce the complexity.
> 
So your embedded targets do have hardware OpenGL/DirectX support?

> The strategy we have taken in our vector rendering engine is to use
> integer's upto the point we detect that we need to drop to
> float/double's. Hopefully a similar strategy will be adopted when people
> look at performance in Cario.
> 
> Regards
> Damian
> 
> 
>>On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:25 -0500, Sean Kelley wrote:
>>
>>>I was wondering if anyone has been considering the long-term impact
> 
> of
> 
>>>the floating point intensive Cairo on embedded products wishing to
>>>make use of Gtk+?  In general, resource limited processors like ARM
>>>lack an fpu.  Recent improvements such as softfloat in gcc have
>>>helped.  But just curious if there are other developers on this list
>>>who have a long term interest in staying in step with Gtk+
>>>improvements beyond 2.6.  Currently I am doing an embedded design
>>>based on Gtk+ 2.6.10.  I just was curious if there are other embedded
>>>developers on this list.
>>
>>I lurk on this list keeping half an eye on cairo development.
>>
>>We use GTK+ (2.4.x right now) in an embedded product and hope to be
> 
> able
> 
>>to continue to use GTK+ on that platform, as well as cairo in its own
>>right. Our "embedded" platform (a Geode GX2) is really very powerful,
> 
> so
> 
>>fpu support isn't itself a problem, but we have a general interest in
>>cairo and GTK+ staying slim and fast so that our products are
>>responsive.
>>
>>kind regards,
>>
>>Seb James
>>
> 
> 
> --
> Damian Dixon, BSc(Hons), BSc(Hons), FRGS.
> TENET Defence Ltd., North Heath Lane, Horsham, West Sussex, RH12
> 5UX,United Kingdom
> Tel: +44 1403 273173  Fax: +44 1403 273123
> Email: damian.dixon at tenet.co.uk
> http://www.tenet.co.uk, http://www.tenetdefence.com
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