From: Berry Kercheval kerch@parc.xerox.com
Subject: Set User (aka su)
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 11:31:20 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <19950823153120.6wcdUCeERGLLUFq0TOxJw7ogrB85iH1WMFPSMN4_F4w@z> (raw)
>>>"Nigel Roles" said:
> > I hate to find myself in the possible position of defending Sun
> > on this one, but I would like to point out that there were two very
> > significant reasons for this: (1) folks didn't expect that performance
> > would be an issue, and (2) the code involved was interpreted forth
> > running from EEPROM which require 1 usec/byte fetch. It doesn't
>
> Why is interpreted Forth a defence? Sounds more like a plea bargain.
Interpreted Forth is not the defence, it's the excuse. The defence is most
people don't live in the raw console; they start some kind of window system
immediately upon booting; some even start it automatically.
And, by the way, it's not just the interpreted code that makes it slow; the
raw console bitmap font lives in that EEPROM too, and the stock console
driver hits it for every row of every character.
A friend of mine wrote a little program that copies the code to RAM and forks
a new shell for you; this makes running on the console ENORMOUSLY faster. I
like to use it when I'm debugging a driver that I expect to crash and
don't want to take the time to start X up.
Later Sun EEPROM code does this (copy font to RAM) too; it may even copy out
its own code, I'm not sure. It gets a lot snappier.
....but this is all irrelevant to 9fans. Maybe when my CDROM comes I can
be more relevant :-)
--berry
Berry Kercheval :: Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
next reply other threads:[~1995-08-23 15:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
1995-08-23 15:31 Berry [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
1995-08-30 16:05 Andrew
1995-08-28 4:28 Byron
1995-08-27 14:46 Gary
1995-08-23 8:36 Nigel
1995-08-22 21:50 Bill
1995-08-22 19:03 Walter
1995-08-22 15:28 carvell
1995-08-22 11:37 dhog
1995-08-22 3:27 rob
1995-08-21 23:51 rob
1995-08-21 23:42 forsyth
1995-08-21 21:14 Steve
1995-08-21 21:01 Steve
1995-08-21 12:04 Vadim
1995-08-21 11:24 Vadim
1995-08-21 6:59 Vadim
1995-08-21 4:36 Vadim
1995-08-19 7:25 rob
1995-08-18 9:34 Vadim
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