[OLPC Engineering] [Techteam] New F14-arm build os21

[Bernie Innocenti]

On Thu, 2011-12-22 at 11:32 +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > That's exactly the feedback I was looking for, thanks. That's a UI bug
> > in Sugar. I would strongly prefer the Sugar environment to behave more
> > like Android, where any app/activity that is in the bg may get an
> > instruction from the shell / OS to cleanup and exit.
> 
> Good that we're on the same wavelength - I had a similar thought!
> 
> The annoying thing about Android, however, is that for an app to
> continue to work in the background it needs to be coded in that way. I
> suppose that if we were to treat Sugar as an 'appliance' UI (which is
> how I tend to think about it), this isn't such a bad idea.

An additional problem is startup time. Python code tends to be a lot
slower to load and initialize than compiled Java bytecode.

Anyway, closing an activity automatically when memory is short would
still be preferable to the current behavior of trashing the VM until the
OOM kicks in.


> A quick hack would be to limit the number of activities that can run
> simultaneously.

I agree. How about 4? Seems sufficient for most productive workloads.

> Our next OS will likely have the Dextrose resource monitor [1]. I
> don't think we should be expecting children to be managing their
> system resources, though. It should 'just work'.

That was an attempt to make users more aware of the physical limits of
the system rather than make the system itself smarter.

An unexpected consequence reported from Uruguay is that some children
would open plenty of activities *intentionally* because "it's fun to see
the laptop cry!" Well, I guess it means that the concepts of memory and
CPU weren't too hard to grasp after all. Better not give them any pets,
though.

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team