Squeak-dev January 2007

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160 participants
184 discussions

A Thought about Multiple Cores
by Dan Ingalls 27 Jan '07

27 Jan '07

In 1978 we built a Smalltalk to run on the NoteTaker, an experimental somewhat portable (we called it *trans* portable ;-) computer with an 8-MHz (this was considered fast ;-) 8086 processor. In addition to the ST processor board, there was an I/O board with a 4-MHz 8086, and also an Ethernet board with an 8-MHz 8086. We got ST going on it, and it actually ran pretty well. But you know how it is -- faster is always better. We weren't doing anything with the Ethernet board, and I started to get ideas... This was the first Smalltalk that did all graphics with BitBlt and Smalltalk so, eg, while displaying text, there was as much work running the bytecodes to pick characters and set up BitBlt as there was to actually do the BitBlt operations. So it occurred to me to have the BitBlt primitive simply put BitBlt requests on a queue, and then use the Etherenet processor to read the queue and do the actual Blt. I can't believe that I actually did this, but the truth is that it worked beautifully. We only used it a few times because there was only one working Ethernet board (for that matter there was usually only one working NoteTaker ;-) but the result was nearly a full factor of two improvement in how the UI behaved. Obviously care had to be taken to wait for completion when the destination was not the Display, but it's easy to check and occurs relatively infrequently. [I can't remember, but I think I simply ran these in the ST processor rather than queuing them for the Ether processor, so in some cases BitBlt could actually be running in *both* processors] So this is just a suggestion that, when multiple cores are available, Squeak might well run such things as screen updates almost twice as fast if we put the BitBlt engine (ie everything after the tests for failures) in a separate thread from the rest of Squeak. What's nice is that it's a very local change with *no* impact to the rest of Squeak except to make things run faster. If someone has suggested this already I apologize -- I get behind on my email sometimes. - Dan

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Maturity of the .Net Bridge
by Jens Pall 27 Jan '07

27 Jan '07

Hi Is the .Net Bridge (R8) mature enough to be used in a production project? Thanks, JP

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Melia - different kind of GUI
by Adrin 26 Jan '07

26 Jan '07

Hi, I just completed first stage of draft Melia GUI concept. I like to ask you, what is wrong, what is good, how to continue and so on... Please look here: http://adrin.ic.cz/Wiki/index.php?n=GUI.GUI Thanks, Adam.

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2007-01-17 SqF board notes
by Craig Latta 26 Jan '07

26 Jan '07

Hi all-- The Squeak Foundation board meets online for one hour on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Thanks again to those of you who have submitted agenda item suggestions[1]. Please keep them coming! At the 2007-01-17 meeting, Bert, Craig, Marcus, Tim, and Yoshiki attended; Cees was absent. The meeting had seven agenda items. 1. Review previous action items. There was one action item from the previous meeting. 1.1. Craig will continue the incorporation process. The first big decision we need to make is our state of incorporation in the United States. Under US IRS requirements we need to have a legal physical presence in that state. Practically, this means we can either use a state in which one of us live, or pay a third party to maintain that presence for us (typically Delaware). I'm the only one on the current board who even lives in the US, and I live in California. Given the expense and possible complication of hiring a third party, the likelihood of future Squeak Foundation board members from California, and the fact that Viewpoints Research Institute is there as well, we decided to incorporate in California. Stay tuned. 2. Discuss pricing of Squeak badges and other fundraising details. Tim awaits an official fresh quote from the badge manufacturer. In the meantime, he will set up a group of people from the community to help with order fulfillment (storage, payment, and shipping). We decided that using a third party for that was financially prohibitive given the cost of goods. We currently anticipate a cost of USD 1.80 per badge, offered with USD 5 "general" donations (for a silver badge) and USD 50 "gold" donations (for a gold badge). Marcus will retire the old donations web presence, along with the rest of the old Squeak Foundation site, and create a new one. We don't anticipate that fundraising activity will reach full speed until we've incorporated and gained tax-exempt status. 3. Cees will report on the state of the Squeak wiki (apparently, at least as of 2007-01-11, it has been successfully moved from Georgia Tech to wiki.squeak.org). Cees wasn't present, but it does seem that the move was successful. 4. Consider Chris Cunnington's proposal for a public relations team. The board was unanimous: go for it, Chris! 5. Start the next election process. Yoshiki, as board liaison to the Elections team, will ask Daniel to get things going. 6. List the current action items. 6.1. Craig will continue the incorporation process. 6.2. Tim will report the official badges quote and create a badges fulfillment team. 6.3. Marcus will retire the old Squeak Foundation site, and create a new one (or at least an up-to-date way to donate to the Foundation). 7. List the next meeting's agenda items. 7.1. Review previous action items. 7.2. Craig will report on code contributor response to VPRI's relicensing message. (Notices have been sent to all known contributors[2]. If you've received a notice, please respond as per its instructions, if you haven't already. If we missed you, please let me know.) thanks again, -C [1] http://people.squeakfoundation.org/article/64.html [2] http://netjam.org/squeak/contributors -- Craig Latta http://netjam.org/resume

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John, do you have Sophie running on this thing yet?
by Howard Stearns 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

http://www.apple.com/iphone/technology/osx.html (Yeah, I know that Negroponte says there are good reasons that the OLPC has a bigger screen. He's right. But still...) -- Howard Stearns University of Wisconsin - Madison Division of Information Technology mailto:hstearns@wisc.edu jabber:hstearns@wiscchat.wisc.edu voice:+1-608-262-3724

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Newbie question: Remove Packages?
by Esteban Lorenzano 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Hi everybody! First post on the list... so, sorry if this is a stupid question :) Does anybody knows how to delete a package from the image... I presume it is something like: PackageInfo named: 'APackageName'... and something else, but I am unable to realize the next steps... Please, need help (I don't want to "reasemble" my image...) Thanks a lot Esteban -- "Querer es suscitar las paradojas" Camus. El míto de Sísifo.

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Mantis and 3.10
by Ralph Johnson 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

I've been learning a lot about Mantis recently and I wanted to share some things I learned. 3.10 will be like 3.9 in that our usual process for changing the release will be to start with code that has been posted to Mantis. Thus, from your point of view, it should seem that changes get put in Mantis and then eventually moved to the latest release. In fact, we will convert changes from the format usually used in Mantis (change files) into changes to Montecello repositories, but most of you can ignore that. I used to think that an "open" issue was one that nobody had looked at. It would be assigned to someone, who would fix it. I was wrong. Many open issues have fixes. In fact, "open" means "open for discussion". People need to check out fixes. There are supposed to be stewards who will take responsibility for issues and eventually declare that they are resolved. However, the stewards are more likely to look at an issue if it is already fixed and if that fix has been tested and has been studied by several people, who have given it their approval. Stewards tend to be busy people, and so they are more likely to do things that only take a little work than they are to do things that take a lot of work. Also, there are many parts of the system that have no stewards watching over them. So, Squeak needs people to report bugs, to fix bugs, to try out fixes and report on them, and to ask questions. You don't need to be an expert to do these things. This is a great way to get to know people and to learn some things about Squeak. To do this, you will need to get a Mantis account. See http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/3860 Think of Mantis as an electronic bulletin board for proposed changes to Squeak. That sounds friendlier than a "bug tracking system". It should be a friendly place! It should be for discussion, not just code. -Ralph Johnson

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An issue with Slang, the interpreter & the VM, and a period in biasToGrow.
by John M McIntosh 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

I was chasing a problem with Sophie where the VM would suddenly grow by 800MB. In looking I discovered a problem with how Slang interprets the following code. Background: When an incremental garbage collection is done and the free space is less than the grow head room and the bias to grow is turned on, then we call biasToGrow. I'll note normally the gcBiasToGrow would be false unless you turn it on so few users have seen this problem. The problem is that Slang converts the "growSize := growHeadroom*3/2 - (self sizeOfFree: freeBlock)" to nothing. In the past I know this worked because I had worked on choosing the magic 3/2 number. ObjectMemory>>incrementalGC ... (((self sizeOfFree: freeBlock) < growHeadroom) and: [gcBiasToGrow > 0]) ifTrue: [self biasToGrow. weDidGrow := true]. youngStart := freeBlock]. ... ObjectMemory>>biasToGrow | growSize | growSize := growHeadroom*3/2 - (self sizeOfFree: freeBlock) self growObjectMemory: growSize ObjectMemory>>growObjectMemory: delta "Attempt to grow the object memory by the given delta amount " | limit | statGrowMemory := statGrowMemory + 1. limit := self sqGrowMemory: memoryLimit By: delta. limit = memoryLimit ifFalse: [memoryLimit := limit - 24. "remove a tad for safety" self initializeMemoryFirstFree: freeBlock] --------------------------------------------------- But the C code that Slang generates looks like so: if ((((longAt(foo->freeBlock)) & AllButTypeMask) < foo- >growHeadroom) && (foo->gcBiasToGrow > 0)) { /* begin biasToGrow */ /* begin growObjectMemory: */ foo->statGrowMemory += 1; limit = sqGrowMemoryBy(foo->memoryLimit, growSize); if (!(limit == foo->memoryLimit)) { foo->memoryLimit = limit - 24; initializeMemoryFirstFree(foo->freeBlock); } weDidGrow = 1; } The C compiler is happy (mostly) and depending on what it sticks in the growSize memory location, perhaps it's perhaps zero, perhaps not, we might as I did some odd behaviour. How clever, and if you've come this far, you've like seen the missing period. at the end of "growSize := growHeadroom*3/2 - (self sizeOfFree: freeBlock)" Helpfully Slang doesn't complaint about the missing period and forges onward creating in-valid C code, without the proper meaning. Hopefully people writing Slang code are muttering, gee I wonder if I have some code that isn't quite what I think it is? With the period of course the code becomes if ((((longAt(foo->freeBlock)) & AllButTypeMask) < foo- >growHeadroom) && (foo->gcBiasToGrow > 0)) { /* begin biasToGrow */ growSize = (((sqInt) (foo->growHeadroom * 3) >> 1)) - ((longAt(foo- >freeBlock)) & AllButTypeMask); /* begin growObjectMemory: */ foo->statGrowMemory += 1; limit = sqGrowMemoryBy(foo->memoryLimit, growSize); if (!(limit == foo->memoryLimit)) { foo->memoryLimit = limit - 24; initializeMemoryFirstFree(foo->freeBlock); } weDidGrow = 1; } Mostly likely in working with Tim I managed to copy/paste some code and missed the '.' Lastly I'll note the biasToGrow logic is there because there is a problem when Squeak reaches the boundary point where it must decide to grow, before doing that it does an incremental GC, the issue is that if the incremental GC can recover just enough few bytes the grow will not happen, but we will do another GC really really soon, thus you see Squeak at 100% CPU in the GC logic, yet not quite growing, at some point you will go over the boundary and grow, solving the problem. The bias to grow logic then ensures the VM will grow in increments up to a certain threshold before forcing a full GC, thus avoids the particular problem. -- ======================================================================== === John M. McIntosh <johnmci(a)smalltalkconsulting.com> Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com ======================================================================== ===

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Joyful.com and planets down
by Giuseppe Luigi Punzi 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Hi. The joyful domain and the planets are down. Cheers.

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[ANN] Chronos B1.196 now available from SqueakSource
by Alan Lovejoy 25 Jan '07

25 Jan '07

Chronos B1.196 is now available from SqueakSource (as 6 separate Monticello packages.) More details, including installation instructions, can be found in the availability announcement on the Chronos blog: http://chronos-st.blogspot.com/2007/01/chronos-b1196-published-on-squeaksour ce.html

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