Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 08:10:17 +0100 (MDT) From: Jeremy Chatfield <jdc@crab.xinside.com> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: joeg@truenorth.org, erich@lodgenet.com, ports@FreeBSD.ORG, jdc@xinside.com Subject: Re: Xinside's Motif Message-ID: <199604121410.IAA02120@crab.xinside.com> In-Reply-To: <11173.829304982@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Apr 12, 96 03:29:42 am
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We have been working on a FreeBSD Motif, intermittently, for months.
It is a native port to FreeBSD. We've been actively involved in
discussions with some FreeBSD core team members, primarily about
memory allocation because of a peculiarity that we've seen on FreeBSD
and that we do not see on Linux ELF, Linux a.out and BSD/OS ports.
If that does not convince you that we're working on a native FreeBSD
port, nothing else short of the product, will do so ;-)
Staff changes and other internal issues have plagued this project, as
well as the memory allocation problem we noticed, so this port has not
come out anything like as fast as we've wanted. We're now reasonably
convinced that the memory allocation issue is something that is out
of our control, and is also not very significant to the Motif
implementation.
Briefly, the problem is that on the other OS's, when we run the Motif
Validation Test Suite, the Window Manager and the VTS grow to a total
of around 20MB. On FreeBSD, with a variety of different mallocs,
using the same source code, the MWM+VTS memory use totals around 45MB.
We think that the problem is therefore external to our Motif, and may
lie in the FreeBSD libs, or perhaps is some bizarre effect of the VM
system. In any case, extended internal use suggests that users will
not be aware of the problem at all. The number of windows created
during a VTS run is roughly equivalent to about ten years of continuous
use of the window manager - we're fairly sure that you'll have rebooted
at least once in that time, so you'll not be aware of the problem
either ;-) If you *do* create programs that create thousands of
windows, you might see some growth - the VTS creates hundreds of
thousands of windows over a whole day of running automatic tests, so
you might not notice any real size increase, unless you really go out
looking for trouble. We'll ignore deliberate trouble makers ;-)
We are intending to work with the FreeBSD core to help pin down the
peculiar memory use, and we have probably unduly held on to the port
while we worry about the importance of this problem. We want a brief
review of our product and packaging, just to make sure that we've
conformed to the norms (deletion of /usr/local - that's mandatory
now, isn't it Jordan?). With a final internal review, we'll be ready
to ship.
I have a nasty suspicion that we may not have planned the release of
this information yet... we have internal Web servers where we stage
information and I suspect that we may have run the program that
copies the files from the internal Server to the public Server... I
know that we were revving the internal order form (we are using the
Web to capture and process all orders now, I believe) and we may have
run the program to transfer that, and also caught up the other
documents in an edit stage - the references to BSDI suggest that the
webdocs are not yet complete. The chap responsible for this is not
in yet. It's quite unusual for us to say much about something before
it is ready to ship - though I guess that pricing could be inferred
from the other ports, and so once it is known that we plan the
release the price would become obvious, so there'd be no need to hide
it. I dunno - too much Marketing doublethink for this time of day!
Cheers, JeremyC.
--
Jeremy Chatfield +1(303)298-7478 FAX:+1(303)298-1406 email:jdc@xinside.com
Commercial X Products - for more information please try:
X Inside Inc, 1801 Broadway, 17th Floor, Denver, CO 80202
http://www.xinside.com/ majordomo@xinside.com ftp.xinside.com
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