Re: more question about porting/gcc

[tlang@limes.de (Torsten Lang)]

> > I imagine that all these problems could be avoided by setting the maximum
> > memory per process variable in mint.cnf. If you have enough memory, this
> > variable can be set to a value that is less than half the size of the RAM,
> > and then you should find that the memory will not keep being broken up
> > into smaller and smaller blocks past this size (or at least not so badly).
> > It will also stop gcc from eating up all your memory. But if you have less
> > than 30 or 40MB RAM it might be difficult to find a suitable value that
> > doesn't limit the available memory too much for memory-hungry
> > applications.
> 
> I do own a hades with 64mb EDO-Ram, but this is still no real possibility,
> I do own that much Ram (relative, for Atari) because of scanning and
> working with images, it is definitely no solution for me to have 2 times
> the ram I really need.
> Besides that: with the third big program the problem would come back....
> 
Quite right. When Bernd and I had a developer session a few days ago we
frequently had the described problem (when we were both simultaneously
compiling different projects) which was quite annoying. On an machine using
ST + TT RAM the effect is not so severe since a program only gets the largest
block when starting. I lost a lot of mails AFAIK because of this problem when
first experimenting with smail in background mode and pop3. So even when you're
working alone on your machine you may run into trouble.

There is one thing Bernd didn't mention: My proposal was to reenable
multitasking as soon as the started process did it's Mshrink() so normally we
wouldn't have to wait the whole 2 ticks. This may speed things up especially
when processes must be started in parallel (e. g. gcc in piping mode - don't
know if MiNT/TOS gcc already supports this).

I suppose this to be a good solution since it's transparent and needs no changes
in the program header (wich may be important for older and commercial programs).
Nevertheless there SHOULD be a possibility to start programs already Mshrinked
(like accessories).

Regards,
    Torsten