> "Ulf Samuelsson" <ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com> writes:
>> >> AVR32 and AVR32 Studio
>> > AVR32 Studio is Eclipse, which is full-featured but for my money very
>> > slow.
>>
>> Saw some studies on this.
>> Eclipse uses a lot of RAM. Minimum 1 GB, possibly 2 GB  is needed.
>> If you have too little RAM you would obviously be swapping = SLOW.
>
> What kind of grotesque implementation is this?  Are they
> loading everything on the hard drive into memory just to
> have some ballast?

This study was made by a customer using Eclipse.
The study was not using AVR32 Studio.
Also, the 1-2 GB requirement is for the PC
I did not mean that Eclipse uses an extra GB or two.

-- 
Best Regards,
Ulf Samuelsson
This is intended to be my personal opinion which may,
or may not be shared by my employer Atmel Nordic AB

Paul Keinanen wrote:
> For some strange reason
> if you open a few dozen of windows in an application (such as IE,
> Firefox, Acrobat etc.) and then close all windows, the memory is not
> properly released, when some other application _actually_ needs the
> memory. 
> It is of course a good OS design to keep the pages for terminated
> programs in memory, if the program is restarted again, but if the
> pages are not released, when some other program needs them, this is
> simply bad OS design.

However that's not what happens with XP. Little though I like Windows,
your assertions are pure FUD and lies. I have built kernel-level tools
that snapshot the page tables of all running processes, and analyze
the memory usage, and what you're suggesting simply doesn't happen.
I can provide the programs for you to verify this yourself, if you
should happen one day to care more about the truth than bashing
Windows.

Clifford Heath.

On Sat, 13 Sep 2008 06:26:34 +0300, Paul Keinanen <keinanen@sci.fi>
wrote:

>On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:43:24 -0500, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>
>wrote:
>
>>On 2008-09-10, Paul Keinanen <keinanen@sci.fi> wrote:
>
>>> I fully agree with this. The Windows _NT_ 3.x series was a nice and
>>> reliable OS running on quite cheap hardware.
>>
>>Even Win2K wasn't too bad.  XP was definitely a step down, and
>>Vista is a leap off a cliff.
>
>I used to boot the NT 3.51 after the Christmas, Eastern and summer
>holidays, not because the OS required it, but I did not want the
>hardware run unattended for days or weeks.
>
>W2k/XP needs a reboot at least once a month. For some strange reason
>if you open a few dozen of windows in an application (such as IE,
>Firefox, Acrobat etc.) and then close all windows, the memory is not
>properly released, when some other application _actually_ needs the
>memory. 
I thought that that was an old known problem for all versions of
windows.

>It is of course a good OS design to keep the pages for terminated
>programs in memory, if the program is restarted again, but if the
>pages are not released, when some other program needs them, this is
>simply bad OS design.
>
>The other problem with NT4/W2k/XP/Vista is that you can not use it in
>a hostile environment (such as connected to the internet) without
>frequent reboots due to security updates.

You can if you connect via a NAT router, and disallow all incomming
connections.  AND you are very careful what applications you run.

My primary outside system is W98, original version, and I have never
had any kind of infection in over the 10 years I have been using it.
But, then, I am quite careful of where I go on the web.  And I do have
a virus scanner.  And I don't use IE or any version of Lookout, both
of which are/were known to do security type things wrong by default.
-- 
ArarghMail809 at [drop the 'http://www.' from ->] http://www.arargh.com
BCET Basic Compiler Page: http://www.arargh.com/basic/index.html

To reply by email, remove the extra stuff from the reply address.

On Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:43:24 -0500, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>
wrote:

>On 2008-09-10, Paul Keinanen <keinanen@sci.fi> wrote:

>> I fully agree with this. The Windows _NT_ 3.x series was a nice and
>> reliable OS running on quite cheap hardware.
>
>Even Win2K wasn't too bad.  XP was definitely a step down, and
>Vista is a leap off a cliff.

I used to boot the NT 3.51 after the Christmas, Eastern and summer
holidays, not because the OS required it, but I did not want the
hardware run unattended for days or weeks.

W2k/XP needs a reboot at least once a month. For some strange reason
if you open a few dozen of windows in an application (such as IE,
Firefox, Acrobat etc.) and then close all windows, the memory is not
properly released, when some other application _actually_ needs the
memory. 

It is of course a good OS design to keep the pages for terminated
programs in memory, if the program is restarted again, but if the
pages are not released, when some other program needs them, this is
simply bad OS design.

The other problem with NT4/W2k/XP/Vista is that you can not use it in
a hostile environment (such as connected to the internet) without
frequent reboots due to security updates.

Paul

On Sep 10, 1:43=A0pm, Grant Edwards <gra...@visi.com> wrote:
> On 2008-09-10, Paul Keinanen <keina...@sci.fi> wrote:
>
> > I fully agree with this. The Windows _NT_ 3.x series was a nice and
> > reliable OS running on quite cheap hardware.
>
> Even Win2K wasn't too bad. =A0XP was definitely a step down, and
> Vista is a leap off a cliff.

***NOT TOO BAD*** ????  I've been running Win2k for some 6 years now
and I would rather fight than switch!  In fact, I was all ready to buy
a new laptop with XP on it and Dell told me that I had one day left to
order it before they *forced* me to buy Vista or pay an extra $100 to
get the "dual" configuration.  So I'm still banging on my 6 year old
keyboard (MS natural, btw, even MS gets something right once in
awhile).


> > The Microsoft reputation was spoiled by the unreliable
> > MS-DOS/16 bit Windows operating systems and the Windows 9x
> > versions were not much better.
>
> Exactly. =A0None of the 16-bit stuff past about DOS 3.x was worth
> the cost of the floppies it came on.

I never had a problem with DOS.  In fact for some things I wouldn't
mind going back to it.  Of course it has little or *no* protection
from errant apps, but IMHO the biggest flaw was the memory handling.
But that is, what, some 15 years ago???


Rick

"Ulf Samuelsson" <ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com> writes:
> "Everett M. Greene" <mojaveg@mojaveg.stkn.mdsg-pacwest.com> skrev
> > "Ulf Samuelsson" <ulf@a-t-m-e-l.com> writes:

> >> >> AVR32 and AVR32 Studio
> >> > AVR32 Studio is Eclipse, which is full-featured but for my money very
> >> > slow.
> >>
> >> Saw some studies on this.
> >> Eclipse uses a lot of RAM. Minimum 1 GB, possibly 2 GB  is needed.
> >> If you have too little RAM you would obviously be swapping = SLOW.
> >
> > What kind of grotesque implementation is this?  Are they
> > loading everything on the hard drive into memory just to
> > have some ballast?
> 
> The above statement means that Eclipse will be slow on
> a machine with only 512 MB of SDRAM, but it might
> be acceptable with 1 GB memory.
> A lot of that GB is used by other things like Windows.

How much is used by Eclipse?  You seemed to be saying in the
earlier posting that Eclipse itself uses 1 Gbyte or more.

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:43:11 +0200, David Brown
<david.brown@hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote:

>
>The kernel was not bad for multi-tasking, and had some reasonable 
>security to start with - and then lost a lot of its elegance and 
>reliability through things like integration with the Windows gui (in 
>Cutler's vision, the gui was separate and replaceable, just like in 
>*nix, since he understood it to be a major weak point).


In 32 bit console mode applications could be written, without using
any Win16 style GUI constructs. The GUI was more or less an add on in
WinNT 3.x, even the display driver was in user mode.

In NT 4, the display driver was moved into kernel mode. In the initial
released version, you could crash the whole system in some cases by
passing a null-pointer to a kernel mode display service :-). 

Anybody writing any kernel mode routines callable from the user mode,
the first thing is to validate the parameters that they were
accessible from the user mode, before doing anything else.

Paul

sodaant@gmail.com wrote:
> On Sep 10, 2:05 pm, David Brown
> <david.br...@hesbynett.removethisbit.no> wrote:
> 
>> stability).  These are more down to the design philosophy of Windows
>> being basically a single-user, single-task, stand-alone system (like DOS
>> was), with multi-user, multi-tasking and networking being addons, and
>> with a consistent emphasis on ease-of-use and performance above all
>> other considerations.
> 
> That may be true for the 16-bit versions of Windows (Win 3.1, 95, 98,
> etc.), but Windows NT was designed from the ground up (by David
> Cutler, the designer of VAX/VMS, among other OSes) to be multi-tasking
> and with a modern (TCP/IP) networking stack.

I can see you've bought into the "Dave Cutler designed VMS, Dave Cutler 
designed NT, ergo NT is a type of VMS" myth.  Dave Cutler was heavily 
involved in the design of VMS, and no doubt knows a great deal about 
good operating system design.  But he did *not* have a free reign to 
make NT as some sort of ideal operating system - he had the job of 
leading the design team for *windows* NT.  Thus he had a lot of 
influence on the design of the NT kernel - and there is no doubt that it 
is far superior to that of non-NT windows - but the system was still 
Windows, based on Windows design philosophies.

So he put a lot of effort into the kernel, and made a fairly solid 
kernel (though not quite as originally envisioned - such is life in most 
software projects).  And on top of that, Microsoft wanted people to see 
Windows.

The kernel was not bad for multi-tasking, and had some reasonable 
security to start with - and then lost a lot of its elegance and 
reliability through things like integration with the Windows gui (in 
Cutler's vision, the gui was separate and replaceable, just like in 
*nix, since he understood it to be a major weak point).

Thus you have a kernel designed for multi-tasking, but a gui and the 
rest of the system designed around the idea of a single user working on 
a single task.  And each generation of NT (up to XP at least) has taken 
it further from Cutler's ideas as MS has moved user and gui features 
from the Win9x line into the NT line.

On Tue, 09 Sep 2008 22:06:20 +0200, "Boudewijn Dijkstra"
<boudewijn@indes.com> wrote:

>Op Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:22:26 +0200 schreef <sodaant@gmail.com>:
>> Why do you Linux fanbois always turn everything into dig against
>> Windows?
>
>Q: What is the number one reason to use Linux?
>A: Because it's not Windows.

Q: What are the alternatives of Linux? Is Windows the only one?
A: There are many members in the *nix family. Windows is not a member
     (despite of what BG has told: "NT is one kind of Unix") there  so
     it cannot  be a alternative for another Unix

>> If it all came down to a steel cage match pitting Dave Cutler against
>> Torvalds, my money would be on Cutler.
>
>Some people are better at cage fighting and some people are better at  
>designing operating systems.

Finally the question is whether (the not so well known) "Bill" (Joy)
and his followers were/are better in opsys'es than Linus and his
followers... (During the 14 years I have used Linux, it hasn't yet
becomen clear how on earth Linux is different from the Unices I
had used earlier and have used lately... Ok, Linux uses GNU tools
from the beginning, commercial Unices needded one to install them)

Can one build GCC, fit apps, etc. in a system which has only 32 MB
RAM, and uses :

1. Linux
2. one of those *BSD systems (NetBSD, OpenBSD,...)

I myself have not done much Linux vs BSD comparisons, only seen
that installing "current" Linuces into a old Pentium PC with 64 MB RAM
will not succeed very well but putting the current NetBSD, OpenBSD
and maybe even that "GUI'ish" FreeBSD distro should work ok...

The glibc usually used in Linuces seem to be a horrible monster, so
those "embedded Linuces" really don't use it but the uClibc... But
finding popular Linuces for PCs which use uClibc seems to be hard.
Producing static apps with glibc seems to result app sizes which are
10 or more times bigger than the same apps on a BSD-system or on
some old SVR3/4 PC-Unix system. A static "Hello World" on Linux
may be 16 kbytes on a BSD system but 400 kbytes on Linux...
How bit the installed shared libs in Linux/glibc, Linux/uClibc and in
a NetBSD system would be, could be an interesting comparison...

Let's borrow ones opinion from 10 years back :

----------------------- clip -------------------------------------
From: Ignatios Souvatzis ignatios@theory.cs.uni-bonn.de
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [comp.unix.advocacy] Any good comparison of
Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/Hurd?
Followup-To: alt.humor.best-of-usenet.d
Date: 20 Jan 1998 09:17:03 -0700

BSD was designed by the government to be a really good OS, because
AT&T
can't program worth a darn.

Jordan Hubbard pointed out the differences between them, but it's
often
just a matter of style, a preference for taste:

Linux is Kaustkian socialist;
Hurd is Menshevik;
FreeBSD is Trotskyist;
OpenBSD is Leninist;
NetBSD is Maoist.

Hope this helps.
----------------------- clip -------------------------------------

On Sep 10, 3:45=A0pm, CBFalconer <cbfalco...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I suspect that you would say the same about Linux if you simply
> stuck to one distribution. =A0The fundamental faults are generally
> concerned with applications. =A0Windows does not have a good means of
> mounting dangerous applications, and thus cannot easily isolate
> applications from the OS. =A0It also costs considerably more, and it
> is much harder to acquire source code. =A0:-)

What do you mean Windows can't easily isolate applications from the
OS? Sure it can--it uses essentially the same hardware paging and
memory protection mechanisms that Linux does. Newer versions support
data execution protection and other means to protect against malicious
programs.