[gcompris-devel] GCompris 8.5PRE for N900 - speed issues ahead

[Terje Bergström]

Hi,

I have been working on porting GCompris to N900 and I have had some success and some discouraging results.

I first ported gcompris 8.4.5 to N900, i.e. the one that I ported earlier to N810. As GCompris was really slow on N810, I hadn't updated the port for quite a while. Now with N900 it started to be playable. I uploaded this version to Maemo's extras-devel repository, and it's also available in extras-testing. This one actually works pretty well, even though it is still missing some things, like Python activities.

Then I took the latest version of gcompris snapshot (8.5PRE3) and ported that to N900. I also at the same time managed to resolve the Python issues I had before, so I was able to get quite a big number of games running. In emulator everything was fine, but now with device, I get a lot of lag everywhere. Starting the game takes something like 10 seconds, and just pressing power button takes seven seconds before I get the dialog.

I'll try to figure out where the speed issue is, but any hints are welcome. N900 is an ARM Cortex A8 processor with 600MHz speed. It has 256MB of RAM. The processor has a floating point unit that is able to compute single-precision floats (not doubles). One suspect is librsvg and its speed.

Best regards,
Terje