[Vm-dev] Heartbeat & Linux

[Casey Ransberger]

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.

My guess is it's a kernel issue. But that's an uneducated guess.

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>

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.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sen8Tn8CBA4

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.

Even if I google "linux pthreads" I still get a tutorial on using them as
the top hit.

This is the most directly informative thing I can find:

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/pthreads.7.html

Hopefully this explains anything I might have left out of my first message
on the subject!

Casey


On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 5:33 AM, David T. Lewis <lewis at mail.msen.com> wrote:

>
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 01:15:45AM -0700, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> >
> > I'm assuming the problem is in the kernel, but making assumptions is
> usually a bad plan, so I'm asking.
> >
> > When I look, I find a rather confusing jumble: pthreads exists in
> different implementations under different operating systems.
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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?
> >
>
> I do not understand what problem or bug you are asking about. Is there
> some issue with Raspbian Linux that is causing a problem?
>
> Dave
>
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