Today on computers, games and other applications that needs a huge of resources require "monster computers" that of course are so expensive.
Fortunately Haiku in an immediate future will change things, (let us hope for it ).
But Haiku could surely make better if it could execute an application in an "exclusive mode".
i.e. that it would close any other process (by user confirmation) in order to release as much as possible the system resources for this application.
Today on computers, games and other applications that needs a huge of resources require "monster computers" that of course are so expensive.
Fortunately Haiku in an immediate future will change things, (let us hope for it ).
But Haiku could surely make better if it could execute an application in an "exclusive mode".
i.e. that it would close any other process (by user confirmation) in order to release as much as possible the system resources for this application.
a cool way for gaming !
That’s interesting…
I used to have problems in beos with some games (for example: Head over Heels) with “just” 192 MB of RAM: the game would hang right after start if I didn’t kill the deskbar and the tracker. I just hope haiku will use memory in a smarter way so this won’t be needed.
haiku won’t have this problem. an important paradigm in modern operating systems is that of virtual memory, ie. let a process think that it can access all addressable memory so it isn’t forced to work in a smaller region of memory. So, if a game needs a large amount of memory (you’ll still need space for kernel-land so the game will not be allowed to reach 4GB), the kernel will happily page other applications in memory to disk to give the game the available resources it needs
Nonetheless it could still be interesting to find a way to ask for a lot of resources when needed. Eg: Ask all media codecs to shorten their buffers a bit if someone important needs a bit of temporary memory and no media.
I’m pretty sure that if no audio is playing, none of the codecs are being used or using memory.
And if you need a lot of resources, your program or the user could set the priority up a bit, and the memory that isn’t being used by the program can be swapped out.
Other than that, how could more resources be freed?
–Walter Huf–
