Tuesday 1 December 2015

more termz

I tried a few more variants on the OpenCL rendering code but none are all that fast - the overheads kill it and whilst it does free the CPU up a little bit it isn't much. Probably not worth more time unless I look at OpenGL instead.

I added resizing. It meant I had to add some locking to the snapshot routine but it only needs to lock around the resize operation so it adds almost no overhead to normal operation (merely detecting a resize has occurred). I'm not yet sure what's supposed to happen with saved cursors and alternate screens when a resize occurs, probably just clip to size. Unfortunately there seems to be no way to set the WM_NORMAL_HINTS on the javafx stage, so there's no way to make it size to cells properly.

I did a bunch of benchmarking and profiling. One thing I tried was another test to compare to xterm - now at full-screen. Running "find . -name '*.c' | xargs cat" from the root of the linux 3.19.8 source tree. After a couple of runs this is about 25 seconds on termz, and 16 minutes in xterm. Well. Yeah it's a silly test but all those ls -l's during the day add up.

Looking at the memory profiler it doesn't really use too much heap during operation, just a few MB and most of that is the image and javfx. I mean nor should it, there isn't data structures to maintain. But having multiple compilers in ram (jvm, OpenCL), their generated output, and all the added overhead of the runtime support needed for those really adds up so it's very very fat in practice. I guess if multiple terms ran on the same jvm it would be ok.

enough yet?

So at this point i'm not really sure what i'll do with it. I'll probably poke at the edges when i'm bored and eventually when I get around to it I will dump what I have to my software site as the result of a weekend-and-a-bit-hack.

After that I'm not sure. It's actually quite functional and robust already (well, compared to the effort in) and wouldn't take much more work to turn it into a usable terminal for me - add some scrollback (pretty simple), mouse selection stuff (not that hard), and sort out some of the keyboard details (reading obtuse documents and testing). So maybe that will happen.

If I got that far adding the "10x20" typeface would probably be on the cards. Fixed-size outline fonts would be possible by just pre-rendering them but to me they just aren't terminal fonts.

Anything further such as a re-usable term component (which might actually be of use to the world) would require substantially more work on the i18n side of things and I don't feel like learning enough to do that properly.

Make

I did a bit poking at the java makefile stuff and it's to the point where i'm using it for out-of-ide builds of termz and zcl and will look into using it on other projects. That's the best way to find bugs/what works and what doesn't and previous attempts never got that far. For all it's gnumakefile obtuseness it's really rather compact at under 200 lines excluding comments and I didn't put any effort into making it particularly small. And that includes targets for javadocs, source jars, and binary builds.

2 comments:

Solerman Kaplon said...

If memory usage is a concern and you're using OpenJDK instead of the Oracle's JDK for FX, maybe AOT it with Avian VM
There's LLVM also but I havent seen recent postings from the guys working on the java stuff for it and seems complex to bootstrap anything

NotZed said...

Well it's not really a problem I guess, just an observation. I'm using oracle jre at the moment. Whilst the compiler must add a good deal of overhead there's also the opencl compiler, opencl runtime, opengl runtime, javafx runtime, java runtime ... which is probably most of the long-term memory use.

I also found the thing causing the cpu load, it's something inside amd's opengl driver and it affects a trivial glx test similarly.

I'm mostly just piss farting about at the moment.