On Sun, 2008-03-16 at 20:08 -0400, MenTaLguY wrote:
In the new version of gcc OpenMP will be implemented (i think its in experimental phase now). With it the parallelization will be much easier, so it would also be very good to implement OpenMP into Inkscape.
I believe gcc has had some OpenMP support in released versions since 4.2. OpenMP is rather limited in what it can do for us, but it should be helpful for optimizing some computation-heavy loops (filter effects again?). Generally I would like to try to avoid the use of explicit threading when possible, and OpenMP certainly fits that bill.
I'm curious if we wouldn't get more gain out of using something like liboil in these cases. The reality is that our filters are rather small overall. Probably something like MMX would get bigger gains that full-scale multiprocessing until we can go "full-multithreaded" across the codebase.
--Ted