[Vm-dev] search order for plugins

subbukk subbukk at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 07:22:19 UTC 2007


On Friday 27 April 2007 2:03 am, Andreas Raab wrote:
> subbukk wrote:
> > An strace of squeak (3.7.7) startup reveals 181 attempts to open of which
> > 179 fails with ENOENT.
>
> Why is that a problem?
The primary risk is that we may hit a file which may not be what we want. E.g. 
If I happen to run a test squeak vm from /usr/lib/squeak/3.7-7, a wrong 
plugin would be picked.

A secondary problem is that each open in an unlikely location costs time and 
processor cycles. This may not matter on desktops but will impact small 
factor machines like XO (unnecessary battery drain).

A second

BTW, running (Kubuntu Dapper)

 squeak -plugins /usr/lib/squeak/3.7-7 -vm-sound-OSS squeak.image

reduced the number of opens for vm-* plugins from 181 to 2 and the number of 
failures to 0. On Unix, the search order for sound modules is MACOS, Sun and 
only then OSS :-(. We could compile each platform's binary to be smart in 
picking the most likely display and sound plugins.

Regards .. Subbu



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