What game or feature are you excited to try out on the Pyra?

[lunixbochs]

GLSL, QEMU, WINE.

 

[TrashyMG]

8GB would be nice.  I wonder how much it would increase the overall cost.

8GB is overkill in the ARM world. Not only cost, but there are performance and power consumption and the amount of PCB space concerns as well.

 

[rygD]

8GB would be nice.  I wonder how much it would increase the overall cost.

8GB is overkill in the ARM world. Not only cost, but there are performance and power consumption and the amount of PCB space concerns as well.

Thanks.  Do you mind pointing me toward some resources that might help me better understand this, as I figured it would increase performance.  Overkill sounds good compared to dealing with sluggishness I frequently encounter, but it is better not to be wasteful.

 

[Yoyobuae]

Thanks.  Do you mind pointing me toward some resources that might help me better understand this, as I figured it would increase performance.  Overkill sounds good compared to dealing with sluggishness I frequently encounter, but it is better not to be wasteful.

It depends on what is the cause of the sluggishness you experience. If it is not memory related then extra RAM would make zero difference.

 

[TrashyMG]

Do you mind pointing me toward some resources that might help me better understand this, as I figured it would increase performance.

Nothing solid on my part, perhaps one of the more knowledgeable people on the boards may give you raw details.. but generally it's known that as memory capacity increases, latency does as well.

 

[rygD]

Thanks.  Do you mind pointing me toward some resources that might help me better understand this, as I figured it would increase performance.  Overkill sounds good compared to dealing with sluggishness I frequently encounter, but it is better not to be wasteful.

It depends on what is the cause of the sluggishness you experience. If it is not memory related then extra RAM would make zero difference.

I know for a fact that the sluggishness I usually get is from too little RAM, but that is also on x86 boxes.  I try not to push my Pandora too hard since I know it would respond with suicide.

 

[TrashyMG]

I know for a fact that the sluggishness I usually get is from too little RAM, but that is also on x86 boxes.  I try not to push my Pandora too hard since I know it would respond with suicide.

Well of course if you are constrained on memory then you will get sluggish.. On my x86 desktop I run idle at ~100MBs in Linux vs Windows 7 where I'm somewhere between 750MB and 1.2GB depending on what garbage it's secretly doing in the background. I rarely peak over 2GB doing some heavy tasks in Linux on my desktop.

 

[Yoyobuae]

Thanks.  Do you mind pointing me toward some resources that might help me better understand this, as I figured it would increase performance.  Overkill sounds good compared to dealing with sluggishness I frequently encounter, but it is better not to be wasteful.

It depends on what is the cause of the sluggishness you experience. If it is not memory related then extra RAM would make zero difference.

I know for a fact that the sluggishness I usually get is from too little RAM, but that is also on x86 boxes.  I try not to push my Pandora too hard since I know it would respond with suicide.

x86 boxes experience sluggishness due to paging memory to swap (ie. disk).


Pandora (and maybe Pyra too) is not configured with swap by default, so running out of memory will simply cause the system to freeze. Android handles this by killing off background apps in order to free memory.

 

[levi]

If the system runs out of memory, any subsequent memory requests will fail. What happens then depends on the details of the app that requested the memory - it may crash, degrade the experience in some way or even hang if badly written, but it should still be possible to kill the process (although to be fair, I don't know if the task killer pre-reserves RAM or not, so that may fail under such circumstances). The kernel really shouldn't hang just because it can't allocate any more memory at the time. The system theoretically might become sluggish if the hung app thrashes the CPU, but that would require a special type of badly written app to achieve.

 

[ekianjo]

Pandora (and maybe Pyra too) is not configured with swap by default, so running out of memory will simply cause the system to freeze

Certainly not freeze. The Linux kernel does not freeze when running out of memory. This is not the standard behavior at all.  

 

[Majin Wamu]

Well I guess people used to think RAM increased speed but really it doesn't. If the RAM fills up, normally what happens is the extra memory is placed onto the hard drive temporarily and that is what causes some slow downs. But I don't think this happens very often unless you are running more than the computer can handle. As far as the Pandora goes, I am unsure if this works the same way, but I know for a fact this is how it works on a Windows OS.

2 GB of RAM is good enough for me as well. On my Windows 7 I have 4 GB of RAM and I don't experience any problems at all. I don't ever get the urge that I need to upgrade to 8 GB.

 

[ekianjo]

If the RAM fills up, normally what happens is the extra memory is placed onto the hard drive temporarily and that is what causes some slow downs

That's only on Windows, and on Windows it uses the hard disk for swap constantly with "Virtual memory" management, not just when the RAM is filled up. You'll see that a windows machine constantly accesses the disk compared to the asme machine running on Linux.  

 

[Majin Wamu]

If the RAM fills up, normally what happens is the extra memory is placed onto the hard drive temporarily and that is what causes some slow downs

That's only on Windows, and on Windows it uses the hard disk for swap constantly with "Virtual memory" management, not just when the RAM is filled up. You'll see that a windows machine constantly accesses the disk compared to the asme machine running on Linux.  

You sure are an expert on these things. Yeah, I figured since the Pandora doesn't have a hard drive to begin with. Oh yeah I know about Virtual Memory management.

 

[Askarus]

8GB would be nice.  I wonder how much it would increase the overall cost.

... and power consumption.

8GB does sound nice but what for do I need it on a Linux Arm machine?

I would love 4 GB but 2 is enough I think.

 

[Majin Wamu]

... and power consumption.

Is that true even if you aren't using the full complicity? I mean would it drain the battery a lot even if you run simpler applications? Or are you saying if you were to take advantage of the full 8 GB it would hurt the battery quite a bit? Just curious.

 

[ptitSeb]

2 GB is enough and very nice.

4 GB is overkill

8 GB is just useless is 32bit space (remember,  32bit = 4Go adress space).

Anyway, a swap is always possible.

What happens when a software runs out of memory: if the software is cleanly done, it kills itself nicely, if not, it Segfault. No freeze involved.

 

[Majin Wamu]

2 GB is enough and very nice.

4 GB is overkill

8 GB is just useless is 32bit space (remember,  32bit = 4Go adress space).

Anyway, a swap is always possible.

What happens when a software runs out of memory: if the software is cleanly done, it kills itself nicely, if not, it Segfault. No freeze involved.

Interesting you guys sure do teach me quite a bit. It sure it a sweet surprise because I had no idea I would learn quite a bit from posting this topic. So the does the Pandora do a swap with some of its internal memory?

 

[ekianjo]

2 GB is enough and very nice. 4 GB is overkill 8 GB is just useless is 32bit space (remember,  32bit = 4Go adress space).

I kind of agree with the 2Gb and 4gb comparison, at least for portable gaming 2Gb should be far enough.

However, for more demanding applications, like video edition, which I hope we will be able to do at least a little on Pyra, 4Gb would be very nice - when you handle large files it's much faster when they can loaded in the RAM. 

 

[ptitSeb]

2 GB is enough and very nice.

4 GB is overkill

8 GB is just useless is 32bit space (remember,  32bit = 4Go adress space).

Anyway, a swap is always possible.

What happens when a software runs out of memory: if the software is cleanly done, it kills itself nicely, if not, it Segfault. No freeze involved.

Interesting you guys sure do teach me quite a bit. It sure it a sweet surprise because I had no idea I would learn quite a bit from posting this topic. So the does the Pandora do a swap with some of its internal memory?

You can have ZRam swap or plain standard swap.

ZRam is a bit special. You takea part of RAM Memory, and you compress (hence the "z") to make a swap. So if you reserve like 20 Mo of Ram, you can hope having 40 Mo of Swap enabled. It was enabled on earlier Firmware, but I'm not sure it's still enabled on Pandora. Still ZRam is not super usefull.

Standard swap is just: you reserve some part of your SDCard (a big file or a dedicated partition), and you use it to "extend" your current RAM (not really extend in fact, you just move away part of RAM not use to free some, and you reload it again in RAM when needed).

2 GB is enough and very nice. 4 GB is overkill 8 GB is just useless is 32bit space (remember,  32bit = 4Go adress space).

I kind of agree with the 2Gb and 4gb comparison, at least for portable gaming 2Gb should be far enough.

However, for more demanding applications, like video edition, which I hope we will be able to do at least a little on Pyra, 4Gb would be very nice - when you handle large files it's much faster when they can loaded in the RAM. 

Bah, the bigger the better, sure. But based on current Pandora and it's 512Mo, and all we can do with it already, 2Go seems to be a sweet spot, that's what I meant.

 

[Majin Wamu]

You can have ZRam swap or plain standard swap. ZRam is a bit special. You takea part of RAM Memory, and you compress (hence the "z") to make a swap. So if you reserve like 20 Mo of Ram, you can hope having 40 Mo of Swap enabled. It was enabled on earlier Firmware, but I'm not sure it's still enabled on Pandora. Still ZRam is not super usefull. Standard swap is just: you reserve some part of your SDCard (a big file or a dedicated partition), and you use it to "extend" your current RAM (not really extend in fact, you just move away part of RAM not use to free some, and you reload it again in RAM when needed).

Alright thanks ptitSeb that is very helpful. So the standard swap is much like what Windows does, except for it uses a hard drive. (I think speed boost works similar too but not even my professor was entirely sure what speed boost does).