XWayland 2D Performance Appears Better Than XMir

Written by Michael Larabel in Wayland on 30 June 2013 at 11:25 AM EDT. 113 Comments
WAYLAND
In the past few days I delivered X.Org vs. XMir Ubuntu Unity benchmarks on Intel hardware and Nouveau / NVIDIA. The benchmarking also found that 2D was also slower with XMir than simply running an X.Org Server. Benchmarks now carried out of X.Org vs. XWayland show that the Wayland-based equivalent is generally faster, at least for 2D operations.

I have been waiting for XWayland to be merged before running benchmarks of this layer that allows X11 applications to run atop Wayland. However, in the mean time, a Phoronix reader decided to carry out some X.Org vs. XWayland benchmarks in the 2D space.

Chang Liu from Shanghai wrote in this morning, "Following your recent benchmarks of XMir performance regression I ran a few XWayland vs. Xorg benchmarks...I can't get OpenGL apps running in XWayland so no 3D. Also GtkPerf causes weston to segfault so no results too."

His initial findings were that XWayland is generally faster. "It is, however, evident from the preliminary results (especially the x11perf ones) that XWayland is doing much better performance-wise. There are only two tests in which XWayland performs worst than Xorg. There are several tests in which XWayland performs better than Xorg. Most of the tests show that in terms of performance, XWayland is on par with Xorg and better than XMir. I'm not an expert but I believe this may serve as an evidence that Wayland is architecturally superior than Mir. By the way weston is pretty much in a usable state. I have no difficulty accomplishing daily tasks with weston+xwayland."

Chang Liu carried out his testing from an Intel Core i3 system and was using Arch Linux with the Linux 3.9 kernel. His benchmarking was done via our open-source and publicly available Phoronix Test Suite software and the results along with the system hardware/software details and benchmark data uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org.

Hit up 1306302-UT-MERGE572853 for Chang Liu's x11perf benchmark results for Intel graphics on an X.Org Server vs. XWayland with Weston. There's also Cairo 2D benchmark results within 1306306-UT-MERGE610023.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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