[squeak-dev] [Vm-dev] Use less CPU (improve battery life or reduce cost in the cloud)

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Wed Aug 30 21:49:54 UTC 2017


> On 30-08-2017, at 12:14 PM, Eliot Miranda <eliot.miranda at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Tim,
> 
>> On Aug 30, 2017, at 10:39 AM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Whilst thinking about this let us please keep in mind leaving some hooks for use cases where there is no interrupt-type incoming events - older OSs (<cough>RISC OS, Mac OS 9, Windows pre-whatever) or bare-metal systems with essentially no OS. I don’t think either case should prevent us moving forward but at least leaving open, clean, avenues for them to keep working would be nice.
> 
> IMO, leaving it up to the VM to decide what to do when there's nothing to do allows better support on those other OSs and bare metal than leaving it up to the image to provide some catch all hack like the background process calling relinquishProcessorForMilliseconds.

No argument there. I won’t even argue that RISC OS is an important case these days, and that’s possibly the last in-use OS that requires the vm to be ‘in charge’ whilst running and to voluntarily surrender control in order to keep things going. I’d just like to make sure there is a small flag waving somewhere reminding us that there are systems we might want to support that are not unix/windows/mac.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: DNPG: Do Not Pass Go




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