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

[Paul Fox]

[ cc: trimmed back to just the list ]

bernie wrote:
 > 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.

but that metric was created for _exactly_ that reason -- it really does
represent how "tired" :-) your system is.  unless you're thinking
of a full status panel, with cpu, i/o, memory, network, etc --
i.e., something only a geek could love -- then you could do far
worse than simply iconifying the load average.

paul

 > 
 > 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/
 > 
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=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org