What is allocated but unused memory? That sounds like memory that will be used in the near future and we are scheduling in an annoying disk load when it is needed
You are of course highlighting the problem that virtual addressing was intended to over abstract memory resource usage, but it provides poor facilities for power users to finely prioritize memory usage.
The example of this is game consoles, which didn't have this layer. Game writers had to reserve parts of ram fur specific uses.
You can't do this easily in Linux afaik, because it is forcing the model upon you.
Unused or Inactive memory is memory that hasn't been accessed recently. The kernel maintains LRU (least recently used) lists for most of its memory pages. The kernel memory management works on the assumption that the least recently used pages are least likely to be accessed soon. Under memory pressure, when the kernel needs to free some memory pages, it swaps out pages at the tail of the inactive anonymous LRU.
Cgroup limits and OOM scores allow to prioritize memory usage on a per-process and per-process group basis. madvise(2) syscall allows to prioritize memory usage within a process.
1) in the Microsoft days I would have a lot of available ram, bur windows still would aggressively swap, and I would get enraged when changing to an app that would have to swap in while I had 4gb of memory free
2) the os tried to be magical, but a swap thrash is still crap... I would much rather oom kill apps than swap thrash. For a desktop user: kill the fucking browser or electron apps, don't freeze the system/ui.
I get we want a magical OS that reads minds and abstracts itself from users, but these days low mem situations are technical events for people trying to optimize resources use and balance uptime.
So not being able to mark apps processes as kill me first and leave others like ssh bash up is a missing feature.
Shouldn't the os have a bunch of auto hooks to invoke for machines under duress? Yes you might be able to do it in userspace but .. userspace will probably get unpredictability nuked in stress situations.
The WMs should have a "freeze all apps desktop except this one shell window" mode. Didn't NeXT have that?
Having some swap basically required has always seemed like a smell. A legacy from the 640k oops wasn't enough days. I can see emergency memory swap system as a feature, which it currently isn't...
> So not being able to mark apps processes as kill me first and leave others like ssh bash up is a missing feature.
systemd OOMScoreAdjust has existed for at least a decade. /proc/*/oom_adj since Linux kernel 2.6.11 - two decades. cgroups are also two decades old. SSH by default has OOMScoreAdjust=-1000 and is entirely protected from OOM.
Since blanket pardons are inevitable, I'm wondering if blanket pardons should eliminate the qualified immunity these people have at the state level, since a blanket pardon admits they performed crimes.
It would likely be enormously useful in this to have a development wiki behind the games that devs and people that played the games may know the engines, file formats, save file formats, compilers, Langs, etc.
Old devs of the games could enlighten the game preservation community anonymously.
Game dev was a frontier and hardware pushing activity even in the directx era. The magic shift code for ...quake??? Was just the tip of the iceberg.
When I started with the gaming industry (Operation Flashpoint), I was coming in near the end of fixed point arithmetic where floating point units where becoming more common as part of the PII or PI era. It was around mid-1990, I'm actually in my early 40's now. I knew a little bit of floating point units but never really dived into the area - also at the time I wasn't really mathematically minded and we really didn't have access to the internet - Australia.
A-10 Cuba! came out around 1996, and only now am I getting to know its internal engine. For example, it utilizes a signed Q15.16 fixed-point representation for its X and Z axes. For instance, a raw value of 98,304 (0x00018000) decodes to 1.5 units - where a unit is defined as 6607.92 feet - which translates to 9,911.88 feet in the game world. Then to top it off, it uses a different coordinate scaling convention for its up axis. For example the up-axis resolution is 1/10th of a foot so a raw value of 10,000 is actually 1,000 feet. Then there are other discrete exponent scaling factors which the game applies to maintain numerical precision and accuracy.
I had a great time learning all this well reverse engineering the game, and also come to learn even today how common it is for chips not to come with FPU unit, and how common it is that those chips actually perform fixed point arithmetic.
I understand that there's a lot of open source projects that are massive collaborations.
There are also a lot of open source projects that are simply one-man shows. And llm should be massively helping those and I really don't see that so far.
I would say they should be a massive gain to the open source community cuz let's face it. The people that do open source are simply going to be different than the people that just feed on it.
Llm should be a massive enabler to open source. It should permit easy porting between architectures, programming languages and interfaces to a degree that simply wasn't possible before
With AI and an authoritarian government they are an existential threat to humanity.
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