performance of 2.4 under Linux

Ian Piumarta Ian.Piumarta at inria.fr
Thu Jul 8 18:10:57 UTC 1999


> I find that the window refresh and other BitBlt operations of Squeak2.4c
> under Linux (Intel) is quite slow.

Does this imply that the graphics handling was faster in previous versions
of the VM?  Some tweaks went in for strange visual classes, etc., that I
thought would not affect anybody who didn't need them.  Maybe I was wrong.
If this is the case, could you try recompiling from the sources in
http://www-sor.inria.fr/~piumarta/squeak/unix/2.4c?  The window stuff there
is not quite the same as in the 2.4c "release".

Otherwise: try turning on X shared memory and asynchronous event handling.
(These only work when you're on the local display.  If it's still slow with
these turned on, try upgrading from your 33Mhz 486sx. ;-) ;-)

FWIW, I've not experienced any X performance problems, even on my
133MHz portable.

> AFAIK Squeak does not yet use the XFree86 X server's Direct Graphics
> Access (DGA) protocol

Could someone please send me a pointer to documentation for this?  (To me,
not to the list please, otherwise procmail will stash the message somewhere
obscure.)  How is this different from the XShm extension?

> On my machine only /dev/audio works, not /dev/dsp.

Bizarre.  Which kernel is that?  (And are the kernel headers in sync with
the kernel itself??)

FWIW, sound is still problematic under LinuxPPC (whose implementation of OSS
does not support SND_GETOSPACE).  I'm working on it in the background, but
it's a rather low priority job...

Ian





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