On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 9:35 PM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 08:06:21PM +0800, Ben Coman wrote:
>> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 1:33 PM, John Pfersich <smalltalker2 at mac.com> wrote:
>> > On a Raspberry Pi, which is what we're talking about, yanking the power unceremoniously crashes the system. The
> Pi doesn't even have a power switch. You can shut down the OS before you power it down, but we're talking about a $3
> 5 computer with virtually no bells and whistles. A kid that yanks the power cord deserves what he or she gets. The r
> est of the OS isn't as forgiving.
>> >
>> > I hope that this saving the user from himself doesn't degrade to auto saving because the pauses caused by autosa
> ves can be deadly to productivity,
>>
>> Since IIUC Linux's fork() is copy-on-write, maybe the VM can fork() a
>> process to perform the autosave.  That might help avoid an obvious
>> pause, however I have no clue how overall performance might be
>> affected by the read-only-page-faults that copy the individual pages
>> that the ongoing processes write to.
>>
>> cheers -ben
>
>
>
> Do you mean like this?
>
>   UnixProcess class>>saveImageInBackgroundNicely
>      "Save image in a background OS process with lowered scheduling priority."
>
>      "UnixProcess saveImageInBackgroundNicely"
>
>      ^ self saveImageInBackground: self uniqueNameForSavedImage nice: true
>
>
> This has been available for over 10 years, but AFAIK nobody uses it. That
> leads me to suspect that aformentioned "deadly threat to productivity"
> may not really be as horrible as previously believed ;-)
>
> Dave
>
>

I didn't know of that.  But that seems essentially what I meant.
cheers -ben