[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Displaying the current status of system resources (such as memory, cpu)

[Bernie Innocenti]

El Tue, 15-06-2010 a las 19:13 -0400, Martin Abente escribió:
> On Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:31:08 -0400, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
> wrote:
> > So, to keep the code and the UI simple enough, I'd propose starting with
> > a very basic chip icon, whose palette would display two gauges
> > representing an approximation of free memory and free cpu, computed
> > from /proc/meminfo and /proc/loadavg, like free(1) and uptime(1) do.
> >
> > Any further refinement could come later, if someone finds the time and
> > motivation. If we come up with extravagant solutions now, chances are
> > good that nobody will do it and we won't have anything in time for the
> > next release.
> 
> +1
> 
> Lets start with something simple, functional and do-able. That actually
> helps kids in this life time :)
> 
> Would be great to have a catchy icon, that can represent the system's
> "tiredness" (load), any ideas?

The UNIX "load" is often hard to understand for users because it
combines cpu and iowait.

Perhaps an instant cpu busy percentage would be more obvious to most
users, although it's somewhat harder to compute on Linux systems:

-----cut------
/proc/stat

kernel/system statistics. Varies with architecture. Common entries
include:
cpu 3357 0 4313 1362393

The amount of time, measured in units of USER_HZ (1/100ths of a second
on most architectures), that the system spent in user mode, user mode
with low priority (nice), system mode, and the idle task, respectively.
The last value should be USER_HZ times the second entry in the uptime
pseudo-file.
-----cut------

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/