Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
Best regards, Tiago
On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 8:24 PM, Timothy Pearson < kb9vqf@pearsoncomputing.net> wrote:
Hello All,
Raspberry Pi is on it's way to being launched and is no available for preorder. I think this product would be a good candidate for Trinity and ARM. Raspberry Pi is a $35 arm board.
I am going to order one, any maybe one of you would be interested in purchasing them as well.
Currently we have ARM builds, but no arm devices have been physically tested (right?) so I think this could be a opportunity for us to do that with a very low cost
Calvin
Sounds like a good idea! Load up Debian Squeeze and TDE on it (Wheezy has massive ARM problems at the moment, gcc crashes and other nastiness) and see what happens...
Tim
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On Sat, 3 Mar 2012 02:36:00 +0000 Tiago Marques tiagomnm@gmail.com wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
With a sane configuration KDE SC 4 is not heavy. On my 32-bit Slackware 13.1, I had 200M used by the entire system. After firing up KDE4 from another console with another user on another X server, I had 340M used, still by the entire system. The Raspberry Pi having a good GPU and 256M of RAM, I think KDE SC 4 can run without problem on it.
Best regards, Tiago
On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:49 AM, /dev/ammo42 mickeytintincolle@yahoo.frwrote:
On Sat, 3 Mar 2012 02:36:00 +0000 Tiago Marques tiagomnm@gmail.com wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
With a sane configuration KDE SC 4 is not heavy. On my 32-bit Slackware 13.1, I had 200M used by the entire system. After firing up KDE4 from another console with another user on another X server, I had 340M used, still by the entire system. The Raspberry Pi having a good GPU and 256M of RAM, I think KDE SC 4 can run without problem on it.
Not my experience in ANY way. Not even with Nepomuk and other "bloat disabled". Still, 200MB is a huge amount, you won't be able to run almost anything else and you won't have 256MB available either, so... tough.
Best regards
Best regards, Tiago
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On Sunday 04 March 2012 02:36:51 Tiago Marques wrote:
On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:49 AM, /dev/ammo42
mickeytintincolle@yahoo.frwrote:
On Sat, 3 Mar 2012 02:36:00 +0000
Tiago Marques tiagomnm@gmail.com wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
With a sane configuration KDE SC 4 is not heavy. On my 32-bit Slackware 13.1, I had 200M used by the entire system. After firing up KDE4 from another console with another user on another X server, I had 340M used, still by the entire system. The Raspberry Pi having a good GPU and 256M of RAM, I think KDE SC 4 can run without problem on it.
Not my experience in ANY way. Not even with Nepomuk and other "bloat disabled". Still, 200MB is a huge amount, you won't be able to run almost anything else and you won't have 256MB available either, so... tough.
You cannot deduce from the amount of RAM used the amount of RAM needed. This is extremely important for KDE based environments. KDE has a very strong I/O usage at startup which results in an initial high "RAM usage", but does not say anything about whether that amount of RAM is actually needed or used. On my system currently only 280 MB of RAM of my 8 GB of RAM are free.
Long story short: getting correct values for RAM usage on Linux is non- trivial. I am not able to say how much RAM is really used, but at least I know that it is non-trivial to get this numbers.
On Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:10:48 +0100 Martin Gräßlin mgraesslin@kde.org wrote:
On Sunday 04 March 2012 02:36:51 Tiago Marques wrote:
On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 10:49 AM, /dev/ammo42
mickeytintincolle@yahoo.frwrote:
On Sat, 3 Mar 2012 02:36:00 +0000
Tiago Marques tiagomnm@gmail.com wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
With a sane configuration KDE SC 4 is not heavy. On my 32-bit Slackware 13.1, I had 200M used by the entire system. After firing up KDE4 from another console with another user on another X server, I had 340M used, still by the entire system. The Raspberry Pi having a good GPU and 256M of RAM, I think KDE SC 4 can run without problem on it.
Not my experience in ANY way. Not even with Nepomuk and other "bloat disabled". Still, 200MB is a huge amount, you won't be able to run almost anything else and you won't have 256MB available either, so... tough.
You cannot deduce from the amount of RAM used the amount of RAM needed. This is extremely important for KDE based environments. KDE has a very strong I/O usage at startup which results in an initial high "RAM usage", but does not say anything about whether that amount of RAM is actually needed or used. On my system currently only 280 MB of RAM of my 8 GB of RAM are free.
Long story short: getting correct values for RAM usage on Linux is non- trivial. I am not able to say how much RAM is really used, but at least I know that it is non-trivial to get this numbers.
I already know that, that is why my numbers are from the +/- buffers/cache line.
On Saturday 03 March 2012 02:36:00 Tiago Marques wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked about reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working testbed, if we ever get to assemble one.
Hi Trinity developers,
it is great that you start to find reasons for Trinity. This is really needed and can only improve your product.
But please stop comparing to KDE. I have pointed it out before and I say it again: for a successful Trinity you may not be in competition with KDE. Finding arguments for the existance of Trinity based on "shortcomings" of KDE is not the right way. It only makes KDE developers not wanting to have anything to do with you. And also there is (like in this case) a high risk that you embarrass yourself.
Now I placed "shortcomings" in quotes. Why? Well because you are pretty bad informed about the state of KDE and ARM based devices like the Raspberry Pi. Have a look at for example [1].
What you have to understand is that lightweight hardware and old hardware are two different type of kinds. While it is reasonable that Trinity works better on old hardware than KDE the same is not even closely true for lightweight hardware.
Let's have a look at the application I maintain (KWin) which exists both in Trinity and in KDE 4. Trinity's answer to compositing is either no compositing or XRender based compositing. Now hardware like the Raspberry Pi is not meant for no compositing or XRender. The driver just does not accelerate the rendering there. So if you use XRender or no compositing everything is rendered on the CPU. That's quite bad. What the GPU does really good is OpenGL ES based rendering. That's what KWin 4 uses on such hardware. KWin 4 is optimized to run well on lightweight modern hardware, but is not optimized for old hardware which does not provide OpenGL (ES). So this is a nice example to understand that old != lightweight.
May I ask how much experience the Trinity project has on working well on ARM? My guess is pretty much none. Do you expect any of your software to be optimized for ARM? Do you have any software running on ARM? Do you think Qt 3 works as well as Qt 4 on ARM?
Well let's check the facts. Trolltech has been bought by a major mobile devices company which uses ARM CPUs in all of their products after Qt 4 has been released (also after KDE 4 has been released). Since then Qt has been optimized for the usage on ARM. I have here a Maemo (N900), a MeeGo (N950) and a Symbian 3 (C7) based device which uses Qt as the primary toolkit. Do you really think Qt 3 is anywhere up to what Qt 4 provides?
Now what about KDE? Did you know that the N9 ships KDE based software on the default installation? Did you know that there are quite some applications available in the OVI store (e.g. Marble) and some applications have been packaged (like Kontact touch)? Did you know that many developers have had ARM based devices like the PandaBoard for quite some time? Did you know that there are distributions actually testing that everything of KDE at least compiles on ARM? Did you know that you can very soon buy an ARM based tablet with KDE Plasma Active preinstalled? It comes also only with 512 MB of RAM, so no big difference to the Raspberry Pi.
I have taken the time to write this mail not to upset you, but to show you how dangerous such statements may be.
Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin
On Sat, Mar 3, 2012 at 1:47 PM, Martin Gräßlin mgraesslin@kde.org wrote:
On Saturday 03 March 2012 02:36:00 Tiago Marques wrote:
Raspberry Pi is the kind of device that can work reasonably with Trinity but not KDE4. Last time I checked I had Trinity running in 80MB for RAM while KDE4 was having trouble fitting in 600MB. For people who asked
about
reasons to keep KDE3 alive in Trinity, I would point to a working
testbed,
if we ever get to assemble one.
Hi Trinity developers,
it is great that you start to find reasons for Trinity. This is really needed and can only improve your product.
But please stop comparing to KDE. I have pointed it out before and I say it again: for a successful Trinity you may not be in competition with KDE. Finding arguments for the existance of Trinity based on "shortcomings" of KDE is not the right way. It only makes KDE developers not wanting to have anything to do with you. And also there is (like in this case) a high risk that you embarrass yourself.
As previously discussed, this was more of an argument of: Trinity has a reason to exist as a fork from KDE3, it has different goals than KDE4. It makes sense to have a different desktop environment, one that is more lightweight but still has a lot of functionality that XFCE or LXDE lack. What I also meant, from my experience, is that there is a class of devices that cannot handle the memory requirements of modern DEs but can accomodate Trinity - that doesn't mean competition.
Now I placed "shortcomings" in quotes. Why? Well because you are pretty bad informed about the state of KDE and ARM based devices like the Raspberry Pi. Have a look at for example [1].
What you have to understand is that lightweight hardware and old hardware are two different type of kinds. While it is reasonable that Trinity works better on old hardware than KDE the same is not even closely true for lightweight hardware.
Let's have a look at the application I maintain (KWin) which exists both in Trinity and in KDE 4. Trinity's answer to compositing is either no compositing or XRender based compositing. Now hardware like the Raspberry Pi is not meant for no compositing or XRender. The driver just does not accelerate the rendering there. So if you use XRender or no compositing everything is rendered on the CPU. That's quite bad. What the GPU does really good is OpenGL ES based rendering. That's what KWin 4 uses on such hardware. KWin 4 is optimized to run well on lightweight modern hardware, but is not optimized for old hardware which does not provide OpenGL (ES). So this is a nice example to understand that old != lightweight.
May I ask how much experience the Trinity project has on working well on ARM? My guess is pretty much none. Do you expect any of your software to be optimized for ARM? Do you have any software running on ARM? Do you think Qt 3 works as well as Qt 4 on ARM?
One expects it, at least, to be compiled with modern compilers that provide some optimization. Rendering is a whole other issue.
Well let's check the facts. Trolltech has been bought by a major mobile devices company which uses ARM CPUs in all of their products after Qt 4 has been released (also after KDE 4 has been released). Since then Qt has been optimized for the usage on ARM. I have here a Maemo (N900), a MeeGo (N950) and a Symbian 3 (C7) based device which uses Qt as the primary toolkit. Do you really think Qt 3 is anywhere up to what Qt 4 provides?
Now what about KDE? Did you know that the N9 ships KDE based software on the default installation? Did you know that there are quite some applications available in the OVI store (e.g. Marble) and some applications have been packaged (like Kontact touch)? Did you know that many developers have had ARM based devices like the PandaBoard for quite some time? Did you know that there are distributions actually testing that everything of KDE at least compiles on ARM? Did you know that you can very soon buy an ARM based tablet with KDE Plasma Active preinstalled? It comes also only with 512 MB of RAM, so no big difference to the Raspberry Pi.
It's a 256MB difference. It's double and it's night and day. 512MB actually still let's you use a computer nowadays. OLPC had 256MB on the XO-1 and you couldn't do much with it without having something to use as swap space (and I tried). I've used computers with XFCE, Gnome 2 and KDE3 with 512MB of RAM and one could (and still can) do quite a lot with a PC and that much RAM.
I have taken the time to write this mail not to upset you, but to show you
how dangerous such statements may be.
I appreciate the discussion Martin, especially coming from you. You have to understand that there are no distros (I've tried a few) that have KDE 4 running in even 200MB quoted on the previous e-mail. I've previously saw ~350MB on Gentoo, stripped down install, and never less than 600MB on Ubuntu. Gnome 3 and Unity are similar, for whatever reason. That's just a class of memory usage that's not suited to a lot of devices. If you think it's possible to go lower, much lower, I'd love to see that in default installs, as currently RAM usage on Linux desktops is up to Windows standards and going higher with each passing year, for no apparent reason to the end-user.
Best regards, Tiago
Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin
I appreciate the discussion Martin, especially coming from you. You have to understand that there are no distros (I've tried a few) that have KDE 4 running in even 200MB quoted on the previous e-mail. I've previously saw ~350MB on Gentoo, stripped down install, and never less than 600MB on Ubuntu. Gnome 3 and Unity are similar, for whatever reason. That's just a class of memory usage that's not suited to a lot of devices. If you think it's possible to go lower, much lower, I'd love to see that in default installs, as currently RAM usage on Linux desktops is up to Windows standards and going higher with each passing year, for no apparent reason to the end-user.
1) Sorry for my misleading previous e-mail, the 200MB were for Trinity+system and the 140 supplemental MBs for KDE4+new X server. I did the tests again just after having uninstalled gtk+2 for the purposes of the test (I have some python/gtk2 autostarted applets I suspected of taking up some significant amounts of RAM): -On console mode (with Intel KMS) the system takes 110 MB RAM (but it could be better since I use the "huge" kernel, which is basically a "make allyesconfig" kernel). -With just KDE4 started, and a Konsole fired up from the Plasma desktop, the total memory usage went up to 201 MB: 91 MB for KDE SC 4.4.3 + X server (Nepomuk, strigi and KWin desktop effects not activated). -With just Trinity started, and a Konsole fired up from kicker, the total memory usage (KDE4 was exited) went up from 110 MB to 159 MB: 49 MB for Trinity 3.5.13 + X server. 2) Tiago, do you use x86 or amd64 ? There is a significant increase in memory usage if you use amd64. The system on which I gave the RAM measurements has x86 userland and amd64 kernel. 3) +1 for the defaults, I don't consider for example that setting the Oxygen effects by default at "Very high CPU" is sane.
Best regards, Tiago
Kind Regards Martin Gräßlin
-
/dev/ammo42 -
Martin Gräßlin -
Tiago Marques