On 6/23/22 19:41, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> So in this use including the header in the first page would be ok?  

Yes, this would be fine. Ideally the beginning of the data portion would 
be page-aligned but I suspect the server may not actually care, and 
anything 8- or 16-byte aligned would probably be just fine.

> Would the mapping be read-only from the perspective of the X server?

It could be, yes, but ideally it'd be possible to have it read-write so 
that I could grab pixels from the server as well as send them.

The address of the mapping may have to be fixed for the lifetime of the 
relationship with the server - I don't know why, but the address is 
included in the wire protocol, not just the segment identifier. I need 
to dig deeper.

> Do 
> you need shmget to be run via the FFI or would it be OK to invoke it 
> implicitly as part of a mapping allocation primitive?

It'd be OK if it were done primitively but I do need access to the shm 
ID etc.

mmap incidentally can work as well but I need to implement fd passing 
which is fiddly and involves sendmsg. I'm putting it off if I can :-)

> Would it be 
> better to create the mapping via the FFI and provide the mapping to 
> the allocation primitive?

It might be better if the primitives could cope with chunks of external 
memory from arbitrary sources - then I could manage shm and/or mmap 
myself via the FFI.

> How should the mapping be taken down?

By manual invocation of some kind of free()-analogue, I suspect; so from 
the GC's point of view, the object holding the external bytevector is 
permanent until explicitly, manually released. And I think it's probably 
best if the image-side is responsible for deallocating the chunk of 
memory too (obvs if it is supplied in a mechanism-agnostic way to the GC 
this holds double!)

> Windows folks, how portable is this idea to other OS's, 
> especially windows?  (I'm guessing this is a standard facility on most 
> leading OS's).  So would it be worth evolving towards a cross-platform 
> abstraction?

If you get to hand chunks-o-RAM to the GC without having to talk about 
how you got them, it might be pretty portable automatically.

> Procedural:
> Would you be prepared to build the VM to test this?  Perhaps even 
> generate it from sources?  To what extent would you be able to 
> collaborate with e.g. Tom & myself in implementing this?

Yes, I would be happy building. I would also be happy generating from 
sources, though I might have silly questions about the process for the 
first couple of hours. I'd be happy to collaborate.

Cheers,
   Tony