MobileGL/docs/Performance/glmark2-handoff.md

glmark2 performance work: handoff

Status on 2026-10-04 after the first optimization pass on top of the baseline. Everything here was measured on the anland Plasma desktop of the Lenovo TB321FU (Adreno 750) at pinned clocks (CPU 1.80 / 2.25 / 2.25 / 2.25 GHz, GPU 680 MHz; see the baseline). Single runs or two at most per point, so the numbers are approximate (light scenes vary about +-15% run to run). The tablet was in portrait for the later runs, so the "after" fullscreen numbers are 1600x2560 and the "before" ones 2560x1600 (same pixel count).

Headline

glmark2 score, -b :duration=5, default scene list:

	stock kgsl stack	Espryt before	Espryt now	Magma before	Magma now
es2, 800x600 window	~1076-1180	~1319	~1887	~778	~1213
es2, fullscreen	~1177	~572	~561	~354	~404
desktop GL, 800x600 window	~1161	~1283	~1809	~743	~1186

The "now" es2 window scores include the two buffer update-method=map scenes, which MobileGL now runs (they were Unsupported before), so they are a fair comparison with stock's.

Per scene (es2 window unless marked F = fullscreen; FPS):

scene	stock	Espryt before	Espryt now	Magma before	Magma now
texture	1269	1672	~2210	915	~1580
build use-vbo=false	1095	467	~1215	472	~1040-1190
build use-vbo=true	1287	1675	~2450	1062	~1730
desktop blur	976	275	~1000	157	~680
desktop shadow	1044	234	~1000	125	~830
ideas	688	138	~550	66	~354
terrain	443	149	~220	115	~157
shadow	975	1139	~1840	644	~1170
refract	838	981	~1280	331	~520
jellyfish	1185	1438	~2170	841	~1155
buffer map (2 scenes)	330 / 408	Unsupported	~465	Unsupported	~431
texture F	~1430	~726	~597	~445	~398
terrain F	-	-	~142	-	~112

Remaining gap: Espryt is at or above stock in every windowed scene except ideas (0.8x) and terrain (0.5x). Magma is behind on most draw-heavy scenes (ideas 0.5x, terrain 0.35x, desktop 0.7-0.8x, refract 0.6x). Fullscreen is the biggest gap on both backends (0.4-0.5x of stock), and nothing landed here addresses it.

Done (all on origin/feat/disaggregated)

commit	change	why / evidence	effect (approx)
4722fa38	the baseline report	-	-
66b47a10	glFinish waits for the GPU on the remote path (a server fence created, waited with GL_SYNC_FLUSH_COMMANDS_BIT, destroyed); Magma submits once 1024 retired per-clear objects pile up with nothing submitted; ES contexts advertise GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8, GL_OES_depth24, GL_OES_mapbuffer (with glMapBufferOES / glUnmapBufferOES / glGetBufferPointervOES exported as the core calls)	glFinish only waited for the server's apply, so off-screen rendering ran unbounded (glmark2 --off-screen "6846" / "12117" fps) and drove Magma's server to VK_ERROR_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY in ClearWireFramebuffer; es2 --off-screen could not start (glmark2 picked GL_RGBA4 and no depth)	off-screen now real numbers (Espryt texture ~866, Magma ~800) and no crash; es2 --off-screen runs; the two buffer-map scenes run
2de0d6dd	client-array buffers are reused from a per-share-group pool (respecify, a non-blocking record, instead of a blocking ResourceCreate + destroy per array per draw); contiguous element ranges copied in one memcpy; the fetch plan skips sorting an already ascending range	desktop blur/shadow paid 28/52 blocking creates per frame, build use-vbo=false 2; std::sort was 27% of the client in build use-vbo=false	build use-vbo=false Espryt 467 -> ~1100, Magma 472 -> ~1040; blocking replies per frame in desktop 29/53 -> 1 (fps of desktop barely moved at this step: the next item was the limit)
d627fca3	targeted wake-ups: the client publishes the applied sequence it waits for (RingControl::producerWakeSeq, its own cache line); the server rings a parked client only once that sequence is applied (or the event ring filled); the parked flag is stored with release so the notifier sees the target	while the client waited for its present reply the server rang it after every record it applied: 18% of Espryt's apply thread was SocketDoorbell::Notify, and every ring was a futile wake-up and re-park on the client	Espryt desktop ~250 -> ~800, ideas 138 -> ~380, texture 1672 -> ~2190; Magma desktop ~150 -> ~550-650, ideas 45 -> ~137, refract 372 -> ~540
963f4d81	Magma reuses completed command buffers (pool resets them at the next begin) instead of vkFreeCommandBuffers + vkAllocateCommandBuffers per submission	FreeRetiredCommandBuffersCompletedUpTo was 15% of Magma's apply thread in ideas	small: Magma texture / desktop +~10%
915882b2	the server times records only when MOBILEGL_SERVER_FRAME_STATS is on	two steady_clock::now() per record were ~5% of Espryt's apply thread	with the next row
e5ee31b0	the anland server build uses android-30 (the APK's minSdk) in build-android.sh / reproduce.md: thread_local is native ELF TLS instead of emulated TLS	__emutls_get_address + pthread_getspecific were 7-12% of Espryt's apply thread. An existing build dir keeps its API level: reconfigure (delete it) to get android-30	Espryt (with the row above) desktop ~800 -> ~1000, ideas ~380 -> ~550, terrain 168 -> ~220; Magma unchanged
bb31f374	Magma keeps the wire draw's render pass open across draws to the same attachments. Every command that may not sit inside a pass (barriers, copies, clears, blits, dispatches, other passes' begins) in the resource managers and wire helpers first calls EndActiveRenderPassOn(cb) (RenderPassGuard.h); the per-draw "make image writes visible" barrier for sampled images is only recorded when an image may have been written since the last one (WireImageWriteEpoch, bumped by every pass end, out-of-pass work and storage-image draw); same-layout attachment barriers are skipped when the pass continues	SetupWireDraw ended and began a VkRenderPass for every draw (ideas: 305 passes per frame; End/Begin ~21% of the apply thread, plus vkEndCommandBuffer cost), and on a tiler each pass loads and stores its attachments	Magma ideas ~146 -> ~354, desktop shadow ~640 -> ~830; visually checked on ideas, terrain, shadow, refract, jellyfish, desktop, bump, conditionals, effect2d, Plasma, Chrome and the lock screen

Each landed with the host unit tests green (WSL clang, ctest -L unit -E DirectVulkan, 2851 tests) and a device check on both backends (frames shown, Plasma, Chrome page + scroll input, kscreenlocker_greet --testing).

Findings

• The common shape before the fixes: nothing was saturated. GPU 7-40% busy, client and server threads each ~30-50% busy, both waiting for each other with a wake-up per handoff. Removing futile wake-ups (d627fca3) was worth more than any per-draw CPU saving.
• Espryt after the fixes: the remaining windowed gaps are ideas and terrain. Its present reply is still a synchronous round trip per frame, and the server's per-draw state sync (DG::PrepareForDraw, 28% of the apply thread in ideas before) is now the larger share.
• Magma after the fixes: CPU-bound on the server. Remaining per-draw costs in SetupWireDraw (descriptor sets, GetOrCreateProgram / pipeline hash, BuildWireVertexInput, vectors allocated per draw, scudo lock contention ~20% before), and per frame BlitDefaultFramebufferToSharedImage (~30% of the apply thread: frame flush + a second submit for the copy + vkEndCommandBuffer) plus Present() of the client's offscreen default surface (a swapchain acquire + submit that nobody looks at) and GPU progress markers per submit.
• Fullscreen: every frame is rendered into the server's default framebuffer and then copied into the window's shared image (Espryt glBlitFramebuffer, Magma vkCmdCopyImage); at 4 MP the GPU is ~98% busy on texture at ~600 fps while stock does ~1430 and is even faster fullscreen than windowed (it presumably skips composition).

Dead end: an adaptive client spin. Growing the doorbell spin up to 1 ms towards the measured reply latency (and shrinking it on long waits) gave +30-80% on light scenes (texture, jellyfish, shadow) on Magma but cost refract -35% (370 -> 236) and fullscreen terrain -35% (90 -> 58), reproducibly; the present reply simply got slower while the client spun. Polling the shared line less often (backoff up to 64 iterations) did not change that, so it is not cache-line ping-pong. A static MOBILEGL_IPC_SPIN_US=1000 on the client showed the same mixed picture on Espryt. Not landed; the targeted wake-up removed most of what the spin bought without the regressions.

Traps:

• Pin the clocks. Unpinned, the stock stack's light scenes ran at GPU 310 MHz / big cores 672 MHz and scored 425 instead of ~1100.
• glFinish and --off-screen. Before 66b47a10 off-screen MobileGL numbers were meaningless.
• The stock desktop turns black mid-run (a pure-black 21707-byte screenshot) while SurfaceFlinger keeps latching ~125 buffers/s, and its score then jumps to ~1420-1500. Probe the screen every ~15 s during stock runs and discard runs with a black probe; restart the stock container + app (stfix.sh) to get the picture back. A powerdevil inhibit did not prevent it.
• The MobileGL app's extra-keys bar shrinks its desktop to ~2560x1410; set extra_keys_mode=with_keyboard for fullscreen comparisons (it was restored afterwards).
• The MobileGL session restores a System Settings window at login; close it before measuring.
• Rotation: the stock app follows auto-rotate; check glmark2's "Surface Size" line.
• Symbolizing: the APK's server lib is stripped; a RelWithDebInfo build of the same tree was at +0x80 for every function (check with llvm-nm -D on both). Container clients: simpleperf prints offsets from the start of the executable mapping (add the r-x segment's page-aligned vaddr, 0x4fb000 for the lib of 2026-10-04). Off-CPU (sched_switch) samples of container processes get their user frames attributed to Android's libs, so use the client's own P65LinkMetrics for its waits.
• pkill -f <script> inside su -c "..." kills the command itself; use pids.

Yet to do (ranked)

1. Fullscreen: render straight into the window's shared images (both backends). The default framebuffer becomes the current back shared image (an AHB-backed EGLImage FBO on Espryt, the imported image on Magma); the bottom-up row order goes to linux-dmabuf's Y_INVERT flag instead of the flipping blit. Gain: fullscreen ~1.5-2x. Risk: default-framebuffer semantics (reads, blits, buffer age, resize, device loss), KWin's handling of Y_INVERT. Verify: fullscreen glmark2, Chrome, desktop-verify, the retrace CI.
2. Asynchronous shared-image present. Today PresentToSharedImage is EmitAndWait, so the client cannot record frame N+1 while the server finishes N. Commit the wl_buffer from the reply on the event ring (or order the compositor's acquire after the producer's present server-side), and allow present credit 2. Gain: light scenes 1.3-1.8x. Risk: frame ordering with the compositor, buffer reuse with 3 images, an app that draws one frame and idles. Verify: Chrome flicker barcode test, KWin, desktop-verify.
3. Magma per-frame submissions: append the shared-image copy to the frame's command buffer (one submit per frame), skip Present() for a surface whose frames only go to shared images, coalesce GPU progress markers. Gain: Magma light scenes 1.2-1.4x. Risk: the copy's fence/semaphore export (SI::PublishWrite), hang-watch coverage. Verify: Magma unit tests, shared-image tests.
4. Magma per-draw CPU: cache descriptor sets / pipeline lookups across draws when unchanged (keyed on monotonic lifetime ids), stop rebuilding the vertex input state per draw, replace the per-draw vectors with per-frame arenas. Gain: ideas/terrain 1.3-2x. Verify: retrace CI with Magma.
5. Terrain (both backends at 0.35-0.5x of stock): not profiled after the fixes; it has 43 respecifies, several FBO passes and a GenerateMipmap per frame. Profile first.
6. Espryt per-draw state sync (DG::PrepareForDraw): the Minecraft roadmap's version-gated early-outs. Gain 10-20% on draw-heavy scenes. Risk: stale caches; retrace CI.
7. Blocking fence create/destroy: EmitFenceSync / EmitDeleteSync are EmitAndWait; an app that makes a fence per frame (Minecraft, Chrome) pays two round trips. Make them fire-and-forget (the client already mints the handle).
8. Client-to-server doorbell: the server parks between records and the client pays a socket write per record while it streams. Try a server-side spin sized to the inter-record gap of an actively streaming client (watch the spin regression above), or ring only at batch boundaries.
9. CreateVertexElements is re-sent per draw (ideas: 76 per frame); deduplicate by content on the client.

Device state at handoff (2026-10-04 ~18:50 device time)

• Up: the MobileGL anland (com.anland.consumer.mobilegl) on Magma (DirectVulkan), Plasma running (KWin + plasmashell, no sticky software renderer). The original anland (com.anland.consumer) is force-stopped and its arch-kde container is stopped.

• Deployed build = bb31f374 (code of every commit above; the later commits on the branch are docs and CI): the server is a RelWithDebInfo NDK build for android-29 swapped into the installed APK (/data/app/.../com.anland.consumer.mobilegl-*/lib/arm64/libMobileGL.so), the client the Release cross build in the container's /opt/mobilegl/lib/libMobileGL.so. The APK's previous server lib (18a5dba0) is kept at /data/local/tmp/anl/srv-apk.so.

• Clocks: back at the original governors and limits (CPU walt 902400-2265600 / 614400-3148800 / 499200-2956800 / 672000-3302400, GPU msm-adreno-tz 231-903 MHz). They were restored just before the request to leave them pinned arrived, and were left as they are. The saved originals stay in /data/local/tmp/anl/pb-clocks.orig. To pin again for measuring and to restore afterwards:

  adb shell 'su -c "sh /data/local/tmp/anl/pbclk.sh pin"'       # CPU 1.80/2.25/2.25/2.25 GHz, GPU 680 MHz
  adb shell 'su -c "sh /data/local/tmp/anl/pbclk.sh restore"'   # back to pb-clocks.orig
  # the restore did not take on two limits once; write them again if `pbclk.sh show` disagrees:
  adb shell 'su -c "echo 614400 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/policy2/scaling_min_freq; echo 231000000 > /sys/class/kgsl/kgsl-3d0/devfreq/min_freq"'
  

• The MobileGL app's extra_keys_mode is back at its original (unset = the bar is shown).

• The phone-side helper scripts and run outputs are in /data/local/tmp/anl/ (pb/, prof/, pb-unpinned/), the container's in /root/pb of both containers.

How to reproduce

Helper scripts: tools/device_bench/anland_glmark2/ (copied verbatim from the session; the phone side expects them in /data/local/tmp/anl/, push with adb push <file> /data/local/tmp/anl/).

script	where	does
pbclk.sh save|pin|restore|show	phone, root	saves the governors/limits to /data/local/tmp/anl/pb-clocks.orig, pins CPU 1.80/2.25/2.25/2.25 GHz + GPU 680 MHz, restores
pbbatch.sh <container> <stock|mgl> <label> <cfg...>	phone, root	per config (es2w es2f glw glf es2o glo): cool-down (pbcool.sh), samples (pbsamp.sh), screenshots + SurfaceFlinger frames (pbshown.sh), 15 s screen probes (pbprobe.sh), runs glmark2 through pbrun.sh in the container (/root/pbrun.sh), black-screen restart for stock (stfix.sh)
ab.sh <container> <tag> <cmd...> / pbset.sh <tag> [env]	phone, root	one run / the affected-scene set
lm.sh <tag>	phone, root	per-frame P65LinkMetrics averages of a run made with MOBILEGL_PIPE_STATS=1
pbprof.sh, profrun.sh, gprof.sh	phone, root	simpleperf (flat, per-thread top -H, GPU busy) and --trace-offcpu -g call graphs of the server apply thread + client
visset.sh <tag>	phone, root	mid-run screenshots of ten scenes
dep.sh, smoke.sh, wtest.sh	host	deploy a server + client build and restart on a backend; Chrome + lock screen smoke check; WSL unit tests
pbparse.py, mktables.py	host	glmark2 outputs -> per-scene tables
symagg.py, incl.py, offcpu.py, callers.py, timeline.py	host	symbolize and aggregate simpleperf output (flat by function, inclusive call graph, off-CPU waits, callers of a function, on/off-CPU timeline)

# clocks (phone, root)
sh /data/local/tmp/anl/pbclk.sh save; sh /data/local/tmp/anl/pbclk.sh pin
sh /data/local/tmp/anl/pbclk.sh restore      # when done (also on abort)
# backends / stacks
sh /data/local/tmp/anl/switch.sh DirectGLES|DirectVulkan      # MobileGL anland (skill script)
am force-stop com.anland.consumer.mobilegl; droidspaces -C /data/local/Droidspaces/Containers/arch-kde/container.config start
monkey -p com.anland.consumer -c android.intent.category.LAUNCHER 1                     # stock
# one glmark2 run in the MobileGL container (root shell in the container)
MGLOG=/tmp/pb-x.log mgrun offscreen bash -c 'MOBILEGL_PIPE_STATS=1 glmark2-es2-wayland -b ideas:duration=10'
# profile the busiest server apply thread + the client
simpleperf record --trace-offcpu -e cpu-clock -f 2000 -g -t <apply tid>,<client pid> --duration 6 -o x.data
simpleperf report-sample -i x.data --show-callchain > x.samples
python incl.py x.samples <tid> <unstripped libMobileGL.so> <offset> com.anland.consumer.mobilegl