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Speed up vt(4) by keeping a record of the most recently drawn character and

Description

Speed up vt(4) by keeping a record of the most recently drawn character and
the foreground and background colours. In bitblt_text functions, compare
values to this cache and don't re-draw the characters if they haven't changed.
When invalidating the display, clear this cache in order to force characters
to be redrawn; also force full redraws between suspend/resume pairs since odd
artifacts can otherwise result.

When scrolling the display (which is where most time is spent within the vt
driver) this yields a significant performance improvement if most lines are
less than the width of the terminal, since this avoids re-drawing blanks on
top of blanks.

(Note that "re-drawing" here includes writing to the VGA text mode buffer; on
virtualized systems this can be extremely slow since it triggers a glyph
being rendered onto a 640x480 screen).

On a c5.4xlarge EC2 instance (with emulated text mode VGA) this cuts the time
spent in vt(4) during the kernel boot from 1200 ms to 700ms; on my laptop
(with a 3200x1800 display) the corresponding time is reduced from 970 ms down
to 155 ms.

Reviewed by: imp, cem
Approved by: re (gjb)
Relnotes: Significant speedup in vt(4) and the system boot generally.
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D16723

Details

Provenance
cpercivaAuthored on
Reviewer
imp
Differential Revision
D16723: Cache the most recently drawn text on vt and don't re-draw it
Parents
rS338315: Fix column alignment in per-thread mode.
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