Cuis on Raspberry Pi

Nacho,

Thanks much for the input!  I don't have a pi/ARM system yet, but the costs are coming down.  :)

On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 05:43:46 -0800 (PST)
nacho <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Cuis 4.2 works well in the Raspberry Pi. There are, however, a number of
> things that you have to bear in mind.  The first one is the OS.

In the past I have run Squeak directly to the Frame Buffer (no xorg/xWindows needed).  My recollection is that frameBuffer support was in the VM.  I don't know if it is available in COG.  Do any of the Linux's on the ARM support the frameBuffer device?  Might be a quick way to quicker graphics.

Just a thought,
-KenD


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Nacho,

Thanks much for the input!  I don't have a pi/ARM system yet, but the costs are coming down.  :)

On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 05:43:46 -0800 (PST)
nacho <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Cuis 4.2 works well in the Raspberry Pi. There are, however, a number of
> things that you have to bear in mind.  The first one is the OS.

In the past I have run Squeak directly to the Frame Buffer (no xorg/xWindows needed).  My recollection is that frameBuffer support was in the VM.  I don't know if it is available in COG.  Do any of the Linux's on the ARM support the frameBuffer device?  Might be a quick way to quicker graphics.

Just a thought,
-KenD


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On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 21:30:10 -0200
Ignacio Matías Sniechowski <[hidden email]> wrote:

Wow!  Thanks for all the work digging this up.

This is a very interesting result.

> Hi Ken,
> I've tried using the Frame Buffer. It works on the Pi. There are some
> issues.
> There's a bug using 24 bit and 32 bit color, so only 16 or 8 are usable.
> I don't see Cuis performing better, on the contrary it's slower. The same
> goes to Squeak 4.4.
> Squeak 3 is snappier.
> I think it has nothing to do with the vm (as in all cases I'm using the
> same) and with the number of classes (as Squeak 3 has nearly three times
> more classes than Cuis).
> I think it has to do with font rendering.
> I have to find a way to replace Cuis fonts by other.


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On 12/16/2013 10:43 AM, nacho wrote:

Hannes:

Cuis 4.2 works well in the Raspberry Pi. There are, however, a number of
things that you have to bear in mind.
The first one is the OS. I've tried several of them. Here is a little
digression:
1) Raspbian: Though it's the recommended OS. I wouldn't recommend it. The
problem is that it comes with LXDE as DE and it's very RAM consuming.
2) RISC OS: Love it. But it's not good for Cuis.

why? Tim Rowledge has been working on this, and I guess he could use your input.

3) Arch Linux: Good one. You have to install Xorg and a DE (I tried Open
Motif, TWM) and they work well. It's one of the choices.
4) PiBang: A fork of Crunchbang linux, based on the Openbox WM. Debian
based, and fast. I ended up using this one. But unloaded a lot of stuff
(tint2, nitrogen, conky, clipman).

The second one is the split between the ram devoted to the GPU and the OS. I
found that the best balance is to have 128 MB dedicated to the GPU and the
rest to the OS.

The third, you may want to have a pendrive of at least 1GB to be used as
swap area. I did that: sudo swapon /dev/sda1

The Squeak VM has benn already ported to the ARM platform. However there's
no COG VM yet. This would make a lot of difference.

Squeak 3.0 with no TTF or bitmaped ones, works really good.
Cuis 4.2 works well but I have yet to find a way to change fonts. It seems
that Cuis uses DejaVu fonts and I don't exactly know how to change system
fonts to no bitmapped or TTF. I tried several things at the Preferences
class but for now that's a bottle neck.

The fonts in Squeak 3.0 are bitmap fonts, like the ones in Cuis. The difference is that in Squeak 3.0 they are 1 bit depth, and in Cuis they are antialiased. If the anti aliased fonts are a problem, try:

    StrikeFont saveSpace

to limit them to 4 bit depth. Or you can limit them to 1 bit doing:

    StrikeFont allInstances do: [ :f | f setGlyphsDepthAtMost: 1 ]

This should be as fast as the old 1bpp fonts, but will look uglier :)

You can also limit display depth to 16, 8 or even 4 bits, to try to make it go faster. (World / Preferences / Set display depth...)

Something else you can try is installing the Theme-Themes package and selecting the Classic theme (World / Preferences / Themes...)

Also I have to work something out with sound. It's not working. Neither in
squeak nor in cuis.

Most likely a VM issue.

Finally, I overclocked the Pi and overvolted it. But mainly using PiBang's
default settings. (check the config.txt in /boot).

Please, let me know if I can help you out or if you want some pics.

Best!
Nacho

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

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On 12/16/2013 10:43 AM, nacho wrote:

Hannes:

Cuis 4.2 works well in the Raspberry Pi. There are, however, a number of
things that you have to bear in mind.
The first one is the OS. I've tried several of them. Here is a little
digression:
1) Raspbian: Though it's the recommended OS. I wouldn't recommend it. The
problem is that it comes with LXDE as DE and it's very RAM consuming.
2) RISC OS: Love it. But it's not good for Cuis.

why? Tim Rowledge has been working on this, and I guess he could use your input.

3) Arch Linux: Good one. You have to install Xorg and a DE (I tried Open
Motif, TWM) and they work well. It's one of the choices.
4) PiBang: A fork of Crunchbang linux, based on the Openbox WM. Debian
based, and fast. I ended up using this one. But unloaded a lot of stuff
(tint2, nitrogen, conky, clipman).

The second one is the split between the ram devoted to the GPU and the OS. I
found that the best balance is to have 128 MB dedicated to the GPU and the
rest to the OS.

The third, you may want to have a pendrive of at least 1GB to be used as
swap area. I did that: sudo swapon /dev/sda1

The Squeak VM has benn already ported to the ARM platform. However there's
no COG VM yet. This would make a lot of difference.

Squeak 3.0 with no TTF or bitmaped ones, works really good.
Cuis 4.2 works well but I have yet to find a way to change fonts. It seems
that Cuis uses DejaVu fonts and I don't exactly know how to change system
fonts to no bitmapped or TTF. I tried several things at the Preferences
class but for now that's a bottle neck.

The fonts in Squeak 3.0 are bitmap fonts, like the ones in Cuis. The difference is that in Squeak 3.0 they are 1 bit depth, and in Cuis they are antialiased. If the anti aliased fonts are a problem, try:

    StrikeFont saveSpace

to limit them to 4 bit depth. Or you can limit them to 1 bit doing:

    StrikeFont allInstances do: [ :f | f setGlyphsDepthAtMost: 1 ]

This should be as fast as the old 1bpp fonts, but will look uglier :)

You can also limit display depth to 16, 8 or even 4 bits, to try to make it go faster. (World / Preferences / Set display depth...)

Something else you can try is installing the Theme-Themes package and selecting the Classic theme (World / Preferences / Themes...)

Also I have to work something out with sound. It's not working. Neither in
squeak nor in cuis.

Most likely a VM issue.

Finally, I overclocked the Pi and overvolted it. But mainly using PiBang's
default settings. (check the config.txt in /boot).

Please, let me know if I can help you out or if you want some pics.

Best!
Nacho

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

On 12/18/13, Ignacio Matías Sniechowski <[hidden email]> wrote:
...
> Yesterday I was thinking on how amazing is to see Cuis running in such a
> small device. I was wondering what were the specs of the Xerox Alto
> compared to those of the RasPi, the price tag, etc.

Marcus Denker did a comparison in May 2012 on the Pharo list.
I copy it in below

--Hannes



<citation>

On May 10, 2012, at 1:34 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:

> On 5/10/12, Pavel Krivanek <[hidden email]> wrote:
- Show quoted text -
> Amazing, a 256MB RAM machine with a main board which includes
> everything for 35USD.
> Some five to seven years ago one would not have believed that this is possible.


This especially *screams* for re-considering certain design decisions that we
inherited from Smalltalk.

256MB of RAM makes it hard to argue for complex schemes to save some a
little ram.
(Compact classes, for example).

How would smalltalk look like if it would be re-designed with the same
philosophy that they
used when there where just 256Kb in the Alto?

This is a fun comparison:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

1) Price.

$35 vs. $35000 (est, not adjusted for inflation).   x1000

2) RAM

256MB vs. 256Kb (max was 512, at the end).   x1000

3) CPU

1MIPS?  not sure.  Vs.  700Mhz ARMv11         x 1000 (?)
                                       + 3D and MP4 decoder

So one could argue that it's a factor of 1 Million considering price
and Performance together...

</citation>

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Hannes,

Quiet interesting and impressive. Seems Marcus was comparing the Alto to Rpi model A.

Now with model B we get 512 MB RAM and a 700MHz ARM that can be soft overcloked up to 1GHz without voiding the guarantee.

One thing to note is that the Alto was bi-level (b&W) whereas the RPi is capable of up to 32bits and openGL 2.0 or 2.1 I don't recall.

I will try Juan's suggestions today and will let you know.

Best

Nacho

Lic. Ignacio Sniechowski, MBA

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 2:52 PM, H. Hirzel <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 12/18/13, Ignacio Matías Sniechowski <[hidden email]> wrote:
...
> Yesterday I was thinking on how amazing is to see Cuis running in such a
> small device. I was wondering what were the specs of the Xerox Alto
> compared to those of the RasPi, the price tag, etc.

Marcus Denker did a comparison in May 2012 on the Pharo list.
I copy it in below

--Hannes



<citation>

On May 10, 2012, at 1:34 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:

> On 5/10/12, Pavel Krivanek <[hidden email]> wrote:
- Show quoted text -
> Amazing, a 256MB RAM machine with a main board which includes
> everything for 35USD.
> Some five to seven years ago one would not have believed that this is possible.


This especially *screams* for re-considering certain design decisions that we
inherited from Smalltalk.

256MB of RAM makes it hard to argue for complex schemes to save some a
little ram.
(Compact classes, for example).

How would smalltalk look like if it would be re-designed with the same
philosophy that they
used when there where just 256Kb in the Alto?

This is a fun comparison:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
vs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

1) Price.

$35 vs. $35000 (est, not adjusted for inflation).   x1000

2) RAM

256MB vs. 256Kb (max was 512, at the end).   x1000

3) CPU

1MIPS?  not sure.  Vs.  700Mhz ARMv11         x 1000 (?)
                                       + 3D and MP4 decoder

So one could argue that it's a factor of 1 Million considering price
and Performance together...

</citation>

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I've been doing a lot of testing and tweaking.
I've tried Squeak 3, Squeak 3.7, Squeak 4.4 and Cuis.
One thing that puzzled me was that when I evaluated:

Time millisecondsToRun: [Smalltalk allCallsOn: #asOop].

In SqueakX, I get nearly 950, wheras in Cuis I get 600.
And,

MessageTally spyOn: [Smalltalk allCallsOn: #asOop].

Is also, much faster in Cuis than in SqueakX.

However all the Squeaks are snappier, and totally usable while Cuis is kind
of slow.
After inspecting the subject closer I think it has to do with the fact that
#fastDragWindowForMorphic is not implemented in Cuis; therefore, all window
resizing and moving is constantly redraw which slows down.

What do you think?

Best,

Nacho




-----
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Smalltalker apprentice.
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
--

View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Cuis-on-Raspberry-Pi-tp4730160p4731195.html

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Well, we removed that. What that is, is when you move or resize a window, in Squeak (when it's enabled, probably still default) will show you only the outline of the window, a wireframe so to speak, which doesn't bother rendering the window until you drop it somewhere.

Cuis is fast enough that we really don't need that stuff anymore on most hardware. The Pi presents some new challenges. Personally I think we can nail down what's slowing us and just fix it, but it may actually be worth putting that behavior back in for folks running on pocket calculators. (Mind you, I'm making a TRON reference here and not insulting the Pi, which I'm really quite a fan of.)

Juan can lambast me to the extent that I've explained this situation incorrectly. IIRC correctly (and I don't trust that I do) we dropped this behavior in either Cuis 3.0 or 4.0. An industrious programmer might bring it back in as an external package. 

I think it's fairly certain that we'd like to be the ideal Smalltalk to run on small/low-end devices like the Pi, so I do think this merits discussion.

On Thu, Dec 19, 2013 at 7:39 AM, nacho <[hidden email]> wrote:

I've been doing a lot of testing and tweaking.
I've tried Squeak 3, Squeak 3.7, Squeak 4.4 and Cuis.
One thing that puzzled me was that when I evaluated:

Time millisecondsToRun: [Smalltalk allCallsOn: #asOop].

In SqueakX, I get nearly 950, wheras in Cuis I get 600.
And,

MessageTally spyOn: [Smalltalk allCallsOn: #asOop].

Is also, much faster in Cuis than in SqueakX.

However all the Squeaks are snappier, and totally usable while Cuis is kind
of slow.
After inspecting the subject closer I think it has to do with the fact that
#fastDragWindowForMorphic is not implemented in Cuis; therefore, all window
resizing and moving is constantly redraw which slows down.

What do you think?

Best,

Nacho




-----
Nacho
Smalltalker apprentice.
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
--

View this message in context: http://forum.world.st/Cuis-on-Raspberry-Pi-tp4730160p4731195.html

Sent from the Cuis Smalltalk mailing list archive at Nabble.com.

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