Software > Applications and Porting

[DEV] The Blend2D library partially runs on ppc64le.

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DKnoto:
I've been playing with the Blend2D library for a while now. It is a high performance 2D vector
graphics engine written in C++ and released under the Zlib license https://blend2d.com/.
On the x86_64 platform everything compiles and works quite well but on ppc64le it is no
longer so ideal.

What works:

* single-threaded mode without boosters;
* multi-threaded mode without boosters but in a limited way.
What doesn't work:

* SIMD operation support;
* asmJit compiler tool to generate JIT code https://github.com/asmjit/asmjit;
* multithreading support under heavy load.
I tested this on my Talos II with POWER9/18c. I downloaded the sources for the library
https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d and the bl_bench test program https://github.com/blend2d/blend2d-bench.
After downloading the library code and bl_bench, I compiled this program with the following
command:


--- Code: ---build]$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBLEND2D_DIR=../../Source/ -DBLEND2D_NO_JIT=TRUE -DBLEND2D_NO_STDCXX=false

--- End code ---

In single-threaded mode everything works correctly but in for multi-threaded mode you should
run bl_bench with the parameter --quantity=N where N = <1, 15>. For N=16 it sometimes crashes
and for N=17+ it crashes always.

By default multithreaded mode works for 2T and 4T, to add more threads I added the following
piece of code to bl_bench/src/app.cpp in line 359:


--- Code: ---    {
      Blend2DModule mod(8);
      runModule(mod, params);
    }

    {
      Blend2DModule mod(16);
      runModule(mod, params);
    }

--- End code ---

After these modifications, I obtained the following results:

* bl_bench-gcc-Release-quantity-1000.txt: results for single-threaded mode with default parameters;
* bl_bench-gcc-Release-quantity-16.txt: results for single- and multi-threaded mode with quantity = 16;
I'm also attaching screenshots showing the performance of selected modes, images can be obtained from
the library's website after entering your own performance measurements using bl_bench.

The conclusion of an incorrigible dreamer:

Haiku on x86 uses the AGG engine and its UI is incredibly responsive, if on ppc64le one had such a Blend2D-based
UI then there would be no complaints about the graphical performance of Gnome or KDE ;-)

DKnoto:
To illustrate the performance differences between Qt and Blend2D, I include four
more screenshots from one of the test applications included with the library:

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