TextChas

I've enabled TextChas on the DRI Wiki. It is now necessary to answer a question when creating an user account and editing pages.

Two weeks have passed, and there was no new spam since TextChas were enabled, which is really nice for a change.

I'm sure spammers can try harder and beat TextChas if they are up to the challenge. But I definitely think that TextChas is a simple and effective solution for the current spam in freedesktop.org wikis. It will, at the very lest, allow us to fight spam against spammers more evenly.

Profiling DRI drivers

I've been spending a lot of time profiling DRI drivers for Gallium 3D. I've tried gprof, valgrind, and finally oprofile. Oprofile seems the best in my opinion for this purpose. More details on the DRI Wiki.

I also wrote a script to generate a time-colored call graph from oprofile output, using graphviz. See an output example of profiling glxgears on Gallium 3D:

The hotter the colour of a function is, more time is spent on that function and its children.

Using Eclipse for X.Org/DRI development

I've never learned to use Emacs. I love vim, but it doesn't scale for me when editing more than three files at the same time or projects with more than one directory. After two years using Eclipse for Python and Windows C++ development, I've been using almost exclusively Eclipse for X.Org/Mesa/DRI development during the last three months.

I think Eclipse is really a pleasant development environment:

• it has a good code navigator, which is also fast (they used Mozilla's source tree as a benchmark);
• excellent support for remote debugging (embedded companies are major contributors to Eclipse, since almost every embedded SDK nowadays is based on it);
• it rarely stands it the way (e.g., it integrates with any build system from autotools to hand written shell scripts, you still have the power of regular expression at your finger tips, etc.).

Also, the CDT (the C/C++ Development Plugin for Eclipse) folks are now actively working to get Eclipse not only to debug remote applications, but also build remotely, which will greatly simplify testing on multiple software/hardware configurations.

The thing I miss the most is better git integration. Of course, it is advisable to have a big screen and lots of memory.

For those interested, I've wrote some instructions to get you started on the X.Org Wiki.