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Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

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Casey Ransberger-2

Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim Rowledge. This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any bits they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this thing, let me know, and if I've got the time I will.

Perf is totally acceptable but not great on the device, currently. I'm missing the old fast window move option a bit.

--
Casey Ransberger

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KenDickey

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:55:34 -0700
Casey Ransberger <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim
> Rowledge. This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any bits
> they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this thing,
> let me know, and if I've got the time I will.

Good news indeed!

What does the rest of the software ecology look like? [Which Linux? FFI up with device access?]

Cheers,
-KenD
--
Ken [dot] Dickey [at] whidbey [dot] com

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-KenD

Hannes Hirzel

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

On 7/21/13, Ken Dickey <[hidden email]> wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:55:34 -0700
> Casey Ransberger <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim
>> Rowledge.

Great!

Where did you compile the VM? On the R-Pi?

Could you please list a few features of what is custom?

--Hannes

This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any

>> bits
>> they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this thing,
>> let me know, and if I've got the time I will.
>
> Good news indeed!
>
> What does the rest of the software ecology look like? [Which Linux? FFI up
> with device access?]
>
> Cheers,
> -KenD
> --
> Ken [dot] Dickey [at] whidbey [dot] com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cuis mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
>

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Casey Ransberger-2

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

In reply to this post by KenDickey

Hi Ken,

It's Raspbian "Wheezy." I haven't checked out FFI on it, but now that you mention it, it would be cool if there were some bindings for OpenGL ES. Maybe I'll look into that if I find time.

On Jul 21, 2013, at 7:33 AM, Ken Dickey <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:55:34 -0700
> Casey Ransberger <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim
>> Rowledge. This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any bits
>> they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this thing,
>> let me know, and if I've got the time I will.
>
> Good news indeed!
>
> What does the rest of the software ecology look like? [Which Linux? FFI up with device access?]
>
> Cheers,
> -KenD
> --
> Ken [dot] Dickey [at] whidbey [dot] com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cuis mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org

_______________________________________________
Cuis mailing list
[hidden email]
http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org

Casey Ransberger-2

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

In reply to this post by Hannes Hirzel

Hi Hannes,

Tim's changes are mostly focused around making Scratch perform well on the Pi (read: ARM6, narrow memory bus, small memory, hardware float weirdness, SD storage, 700mhz proc, etc) but the upshot is, he's ripped a lot of cruft out of BitBlt (if you think about it, speeding this up yields a lot of performance gains, as it's called every time a Morphic frame is rendered, not to mention any time a block of memory is copied.)

In addition to general cleanup and performance tuning to BitBlt, he's also added some native code to optimize things a bit more wrt the particular peculiarities of BitBlt on ARM (which of course will only be present in an ARM VM.)

Of course all I did was offer to build the VM on my Pi and throw in on testing. I might have the exact details wrong in the above, but that's the gist of what's going on.

This VM really does seem a lot more responsive than the interpreter did on the Pi, in spite of that I was expecting "modest" gains from the stack orientation and the generation scavenging GC. I think it maybe has to do with the fact that the memory bus is narrow, and the Stack VM doesn't usually allocate temps on the heap. Dunno.

On Jul 21, 2013, at 9:27 AM, "H. Hirzel" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On 7/21/13, Ken Dickey <[hidden email]> wrote:
>> On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 00:55:34 -0700
>> Casey Ransberger <[hidden email]> wrote:
>>
>>> I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim
>>> Rowledge.
>
> Great!
>
> Where did you compile the VM? On the R-Pi?
>
> Could you please list a few features of what is custom?
>
> --Hannes
>
> This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any
>>> bits
>>> they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this thing,
>>> let me know, and if I've got the time I will.
>>
>> Good news indeed!
>>
>> What does the rest of the software ecology look like? [Which Linux? FFI up
>> with device access?]
>>
>> Cheers,
>> -KenD
>> --
>> Ken [dot] Dickey [at] whidbey [dot] com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Cuis mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Cuis mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://jvuletich.org/mailman/listinfo/cuis_jvuletich.org

_______________________________________________
Cuis mailing list
[hidden email]
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Juan Vuletich-4

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

In reply to this post by Casey Ransberger-2

Hi Casey,

On 7/21/2013 4:55 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> I've got the latest Cuis running on a custom Stack VM courtesy of Tim
> Rowledge. This could come in handy for perf testing. If anyone has any
> bits they'd like me to squeeze through the eye of the needle with this
> thing, let me know, and if I've got the time I will.
>
> Perf is totally acceptable but not great on the device, currently. I'm
> missing the old fast window move option a bit.
>

Mhh. I see. Unfortunately it was a conflict between simplicity and
consistency (just relying on the hand to grab any Morph, including
windows) and performance on slow machines. Besides, the implementation
was a bit hacky, and not suitable for Morphic 3.

If you really want it, you can grab the code from an older Cuis image,
and build a package...

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

> --
> Casey Ransberger
>

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Juan Vuletich-4

Re: Cuis on Stack VM on Raspberry Pi

In reply to this post by Casey Ransberger-2

On 7/21/2013 6:08 PM, Casey Ransberger wrote:

> Hi Hannes,
>
> Tim's changes are mostly focused around making Scratch perform well on the Pi (read: ARM6, narrow memory bus, small memory, hardware float weirdness, SD storage, 700mhz proc, etc) but the upshot is, he's ripped a lot of cruft out of BitBlt (if you think about it, speeding this up yields a lot of performance gains, as it's called every time a Morphic frame is rendered, not to mention any time a block of memory is copied.)
>
> In addition to general cleanup and performance tuning to BitBlt, he's also added some native code to optimize things a bit more wrt the particular peculiarities of BitBlt on ARM (which of course will only be present in an ARM VM.)
>
> Of course all I did was offer to build the VM on my Pi and throw in on testing. I might have the exact details wrong in the above, but that's the gist of what's going on.
>
> This VM really does seem a lot more responsive than the interpreter did on the Pi, in spite of that I was expecting "modest" gains from the stack orientation and the generation scavenging GC. I think it maybe has to do with the fact that the memory bus is narrow, and the Stack VM doesn't usually allocate temps on the heap. Dunno.
>

Cool. Nice to know. Thanks!

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich

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