[webkit-dev] parallel painting

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 9:32 PM, Zoltan Herczeg <zherczeg at inf.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am working on a parallel painting feature for WebKit (bug id: 36883).
> Basically it records the painting commands on the main thread, and replay
> them on a painting thread. The gain would be that the recording operation
> is cheap. Currently it is Qt specific, but I could make it more platform
> independent if other ports are interested.

EFL port would be interested in this. Could you provide more details
on the implementation? Is the painting thread a single thread, or is
it being split to N cores?

Did you consider the alternative that is isolate webkit layout in
another thread as well? From our environment tests (embedded systems),
re-layout process can take few seconds without any paint... that being
done in the main thread hurts the whole experience as the event
processing of menus, animations and others are blocked. In an ideal
world WebKit would never block, it would just proxy input and output
events to its thread (hard, error-prone... :-/), there it would
layout, render and when ready release the main thread to use the
painted contents (maybe tiles as the Qt port now enables).

BR,

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
http://profusion.mobi embedded systems
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