[Sugar-devel] Vision

[James Cameron]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 06:29:21PM -0500, Jerry Vonau wrote:
> 
> 
> > On April 20, 2016 at 5:54 PM Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Hi
> > 
> > On 20 April 2016 at 18:27, James Cameron <quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 05:22:21PM -0400, Dave Crossland wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On 20 April 2016 at 16:46, James Cameron <[1]quozl at laptop.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >     the performance ratio between our low-cost
> > > >     low-power hardware and the competition was already evident on
> > > > Fedora
> > > >     Linux; it didn't need Windows to expose it
> > > >
> > > > Sorry if this is an obvious question, but, can anything done to make
> > > > Sugar feel faster on XO-1s today?
> > >
> > > Yes, and I've been doing some of that in the past few months.
> > 
> > 
> > AWESOME
> > 
> > 
> > > With 13.2.7 you have my latest work, which added swap and removed
> > > several
> > > animations.
> > >
> > 
> > Great :)
> > 
> > 
> > > Adding swap has mostly removed memory pressure.
> > 
> > 
> > Is it possible to configure the swap to run on the SD card, which, if
> > failing due to thrashing, can easily be replaced?
> > 
> > 
> > > Under memory
> > > pressure, activity startup is roughly doubled,
> > 
> > 
> > WOW
> > 
> > 
> > > as the CPU spends time thrashing in the memory management.
> > 
> > Disadvantage is higher power cost
> > > and possibly decreased Flash endurance, although the endurance of a
> > > set of heavily used XO-1 has shown no sign of the deterioration
> > > expected by now.
> > >
> > 
> > Yes, it is somewhat astonishing to me that any XO-1 are still working at
> > all :) I would have thought they'd all have cracked screens and ripped
> > keyboards by now.
> > 
> > Maybe this was brought up on the XO-1 thread I started, but I didn't
> > remember if so; does anyone has any suggestions about how many XO-1s are
> > still in use?
> > 
> > 
> > > Removing animations has allowed CPU cycles to be better spent on
> > > responsiveness.  At one stage we had 50/50 competition between the
> > > activity launch animation and the starting activity.
> > 
> > 
> > Woah :)
> > 
> > 
> > > Instrumenting
> > > the frame and transition box animations showed there was enough time
> > > for only one or two intermediate animation states before the final
> > > state; which turned out to the cost of handling the function key
> > > release event.  Some of these changes are not in Sugar master yet, but
> > > in an OLPC branch; one such was proposed, but immediately closed with
> > > appeal to process;
> > >
> > >         https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/pull/619
> > 
> > 
> > I sympathise with Sam's request to discuss further; eg, perhaps there is
> > a
> > compromise by wrapping the decision to animate in an if/else block that
> > checks some cpuinfo in /proc, or if the number of running activities can
> > be
> > obtained very cheaply through a len() call or something?
> > 
> > 
> > > As for what to do next; ideas are welcome, but here's a few;
> > >
> > > - profiling, of startup, of interactive response, (i've used xdotool
> > >   for interactive response tests),
> > >
> > 
> > AWESOME! Could you make a screencast showing how to set this up?
> > 
> > 
> > > - upgrade Gtk3, and GObject, to fix the memory leaks,
> > >
> > 
> > I like it!
> > 
> > 
> 
> You are referring to updating the underling OS from F18/20 to
> current(F22/F23/F24) to match the current SoaS offering? 

Not only.  Also backporting Gtk3 and GObject to F18.

> For the
> XO-1/XO-1.5 that is a pile easier to do giving you can run OSBuilder on
> pretty much any X86 host. There are warning about running OSBuilder under a
> different host OS from the target but I've been successful in building
> XO-1.5 images and having them boot. At least the door is open for further
> digging, debugging and refinement.
> 
> Jerry

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/