<div dir="ltr">Well I guess maybe I left a part of the message out. Oops. I'm talking about Cog's heart. It needs user-level thread prioritization and apparently (GNU/?)Linux lacks this.<div><br></div><div>My guess is it's a kernel issue. But that's an uneducated guess.</div>
<div><br></div><div style>It became interesting to me because I'm not super happy with the UI responsiveness of Squeak trunk under the interpreter and Raspbian on a 700MHz Pi (out of box experience isn't overclocked, so I'm targeting that.) My thought was to get the stack VM going, but we still have this issue with the heartbeat for the stack VM to be able to perform optimally. If I can fix the heartbeat (read: pthreads) issue, I can benefit GNU/Linux users of the system across the board, both in terms of the (Intel) JIT, and in terms of the stack oriented virtual machine which has the awesome Ungar-style garbage collection, right? I want the efficient GC eventually anyway. The advantages of stack orientation are somewhat beyond my current understanding of virtual machines, but I gather that's desirable as well? </noob></div>
<div style><br></div><div style>I need to do some tests with Cuis, Spoon, Pharo, and Etoys before I'm going to blame any part of the VM about the UI perf I'm seeing, but a faster VM is a faster VM anyway. I'd like to make all of the images faster on this little gadget, because it's cool, it's popular, and it gives us an approach on more than just the third world (not that the third world isn't incredibly important, just that if we don't start making better adults where people with first world problems are too, I'll end up feeling like Rick Moranis in Spaceballs or I'm going to have to relocate to someplace where we previously made better adults.)</div>
<div style><br></div><div style><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sen8Tn8CBA4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sen8Tn8CBA4</a><br></div><div style><br></div><div style>I know this isn't really the place to ask, but I thought maybe someone might be able to point me at what I'd need to dig into to understand the problem we have with the popular Linux implementation of pthreads, because when I GOOG that, I get #1 a tutorial on using pthreads, #2 a Wikipedia article which speaks abstractly about pthreads, and #3 another tutorial on using pthreads. I think I'm trying to figure out what to google for so that I can figure out where the problem lives and then look at it to see whether or not I can steal its lunch money.</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Even if I google "linux pthreads" I still get a tutorial on using them as the top hit.</div><div style><br></div><div style>This is the most directly informative thing I can find:</div>
<div style><br></div><div style><a href="http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/pthreads.7.html">http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/pthreads.7.html</a><br></div><div style><br></div><div style>Hopefully this explains anything I might have left out of my first message on the subject!</div>
<div style><br></div><div style>Casey</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 5:33 AM, David T. Lewis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:lewis@mail.msen.com" target="_blank">lewis@mail.msen.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 01:15:45AM -0700, Casey Ransberger wrote:<br>
><br>
> I'm assuming the problem is in the kernel, but making assumptions is usually a bad plan, so I'm asking.<br>
><br>
> When I look, I find a rather confusing jumble: pthreads exists in different implementations under different operating systems.<br>
><br>
> I'd kind of like the heartbeat to work right under Raspbian, because kids are going to use it, and the goal of producing better adults is pretty close to my heart. See also making Squeak faster. (Stack VM.)<br>
><br>
> I want to arm myself with as much knowledge about this as possible, because I'm considering just bloody fixing it. If the (GNU/Linux) community has objections, and I'm able to pull off the fix, I can make a patch available to people who want it.<br>
><br>
> I'm not confident that I can fix the bug with the knowledge I have now, but I'm confident that I can fix it eventually, if someone else doesn't beat me to the punch.<br>
><br>
> Outside of the wiki page, are there any documents/people/mailing lists I should look at to be able to get a good handle on where in the kernel (or elsewhere) I should be looking for the code which isn't meeting our Cog-nitive requirements?<br>
><br>
<br>
</div></div>I do not understand what problem or bug you are asking about. Is there<br>
some issue with Raspbian Linux that is causing a problem?<br>
<br>
Dave<br></blockquote></div><br></div></div>