Hi, as all of you probably know, smp based systems are getting widespread even in the embedded domain, and we hope we can speed up webkit on these systems. We did some profiling, and seemed the platform dependent rendering took 50% of the total runtime (at least on our test platforms). We are thinking about adding some parallel rendering support for WebKit, probably mostly platform dependent code, but the threading support could be reused by different ports.
The plan is opening a rendering thread for each document object. This thread is dedicated to rendering, the resource management is still done by the main thread. In other words, functions like drawRect (in GraphicsContext.h) creates a small object, which contains the arguments of the called function, and passing this object to the thread. The thread would do the painting, and send back the object after it is processed. The main thread can free the memory space of the object later, and dereference the resources (we hope resources like fonts and images are not need to be duplicated). This is still a vague idea, and we are still investigating the possibilities. What is your opinion? Do you know about any major blockers we should know about? Thanks in advance, Zoltan _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
