Swap Space / Virtual Memory (VMM, paging RAM memory to a pagefile on the harddrive)?
#1
Question 
hi,

would it be possible for the implementation of virtual memory (such as what odd, co-developer of surreal implemented into his emulator) ? would this solve any of the memory problems? (memory problems i've read about include asain mplayer subtitle fonts crashing the xbox due to lack of memory)
would this also increase the playback quality of some codecs or resolutions?

morien
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#2
doubt it would help for fonts, but maybe for big subtitle files. we only need the next 2 lines (pics) in memory of the subfile.



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#3
yes the only point i see in virtual memory is for larger subtitle files (dvd vobsub subtitle files that is, as can be quite large).
(edit: correction, i meant "larger subtitle files", not larger subtitle fonts)



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#4
i thought there might be some use for it. even if all it did was prevent the xbox from running out of memory and locking up.
perhaps it would be worth it for the larger subtitle fonts? or the asain fonts, etc which are too big for the stock memory?

morien
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#5
just to ressurect this.
i've been seeing quite a bit of discussion about memory issues in #xbmc as of late. would virtual memory have a use now?

morien
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#6
i know that 64mb is a pretty small amount of memory to use and xbmc is pretty smart about only allocating the memory it needs at a given moment.

i was wondering if anyone has thought about adding a virtual memory manager? i mean the xbox hd can easily spare a few hundred megs for a swap file. this would instantly solve alot of the memory problems people are having.

i will try to investigate more how feasible it is though once i have my env set up :-)

-ast
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#7
i think there's a reason why we dont have it, cant really recall exactly why at the moment though

also, lets not forget, you can forget about the golden silence with a swap disk on hd
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#8
Question 
After reading these forums, the issue often arises that certain functions cannot be executed because of the lack of memory in the Xbox. This in my opinion makes the Xbox an ideal candidate for a swap partition. While a partition dedicated to swap would give a slightly better performance, a swap file on the E drive would work too.
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#9
Code it up then.
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#10
This could be used as a bases. it's a pagefile system for xbox. just stumbled on it Smile

http://stepmania.cvs.sourceforge.net/ste...iew=markup
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#11
Wink 
I believe many emulators like MAMEoX, FBA-X/FBAxxx and Kawa-X, etc. also use some sort of harddrive swap-file paging to load and play large ROMS, are they are open source too
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#12
The thing that XBMC has going for it as far as swap space is that the program that manages the swap (or virtual memory as this is more Windows related then linux) is that this program can almost be static. What I mean by this is its not an operating system, you (the developers) have an advantage, practically being able to control what is being run, the programs are known (rss, ftpd, httpd). As far as the perl scripts go, the user controls those, so I see no need to add those to the virtual memory. I have a little experience in C/C++ and am learning C# so I think this might be a good project.
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#13
if virtual memory should be used, everything should use it. (can be done using XMemAlloc/Free... callbacks), otherwise it wouldn't be possible to page out much.

also it should be possible to force memory to never be paged, (windows has VirtualLock, same should be implemented here).

then to have on demand pageing, a structured exception handler must be added that will catch any of the general_page faults exceptions. (could be abit hard since we catch win32 errors at some places).
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#14
isn't some kind of swap-file already used for large VobSub subtitle-files?
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#15
yea.. but this would remove the need for that, and simplify stuff.
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Swap Space / Virtual Memory (VMM, paging RAM memory to a pagefile on the harddrive)?0