[Vm-dev] Touch/MultiTouch Events

[tim Rowledge]

> On 2020-09-26, at 11:04 AM, Phil B <pbpublist at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snips]
> 
> 2GB is plenty of RAM for a handful of running applications... just not a web browser with 50 open tabs.  The majority of Debian packages (that don't have full desktop GL or GL ES 3 requirements) run on it including Gimp etc. Not terribly well, but they do run.

I've been running most of my work on assorted Pi with 1Gb or less for ... however long it is that Pi have been around, so yes, I understand that. And the browser thing is just another indication of utterly the WWW infrastructure has been screwed up. We'd be a lot better off if Squeak were the in-browser language.

> 
> Where Squeak is going to have problems is that it's only able to take advantage of a single core @ ~1.1GHz and the lack of JIT support.  


Err, what lack of jit support would that be? ARM32 has been Cog'd for a long time now (coming up on 6 years I think) and ARM64 is working well, though is not totally finished in some part of the FFI stuff IIRC.

My Pi4 (running 32 bit Raspbian) benchmarks at around 35% of my 4.3GHz/i7 iMac. I'm not expecting a huge increase when I flip to AARCH64 but there will likely be some.

And multi-core? Well yes I suppose. Except that one can very easily spawn multiple running images using Dave Lewis' OSProcess package, including in ways that do some work and return the results.The spawning takes very little time; for example on said Pi4 it takes 39mS to do 
    UnixProcess forkHeadlessSqueakAndDoThenQuit: [UnixProcess helloWorld]
I suspect we could do very useful things with that.

> 
> One other not so surprising issue with Pine64 devices is the not great flash memory performance: ~80MB/s with eMMC, ~20MB/s with microSD.  While it's not as bad as older Raspberry Pi devices (thanks to the eMMC), it's in the same class of performance.  You'll feel this when loading things much more than you're likely to notice the 2GB of RAM.

On my Pi4 again, loading a fresh Squeak trunk image takes ~1-2 sec.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- His mind wandered and never came back.