MemNow with >1Gb RAM (minor)

Just reporting a minor bug I noticed just now. The MemNow iconbar icon isn’t large enough (or doesn’t resize enough) to cope with RAM sizes larger than 999999 Kb as it is limited to six digits. Right now, it’s reporting “875952” on a machine with 1875952kb free.

Suggestion – when size is likely to be >5 digits, switch to MB and display “MB” after text eg. 1875MB would fit in my example. When free RAM is >100 MB, I’d argue that showing it in kilobytes isn’t overly useful, except that it does look like a lot of numbers!

I appreciate that MemNow is a trivial thing, but it’s still part of the OS image so bug reported.

I have also noticed that the maximum WimpSlot on a machine with 800 plus Mbytes free is limited to 524256k when dragging the slider in the Task Manager Window. Also RAMFS limited to 128Mbytes.

I have also noticed that the maximum WimpSlot on a machine with 800 plus Mbytes free is limited to 524256k when dragging the slider in the Task Manager Window. Also RAMFS limited to 128Mbytes.

Yes, those are hard limits. The former is the result of the memory layout RISC OS uses and changing it is non-trivial (we changed it from 28MiB to 512MiB in the work for RISC OS 5). The latter is hard-coded in the RAMFS source code. You can make it bigger but that eats address space.

Jeffrey’s recent work towards proper holey dynamic areas, virtual memory, etc, could ultimately help us to lift these limits.

The holey grail?

The holey grail?

(facepalm)

Right now, it’s reporting “875952” on a machine with 1875952kb free.

I have fixed and send ;-)

The latter [maximum RAMFS size] is hard-coded in the RAMFS source code. You can make it bigger but that eats address space.

And yet on the Pandaboard with the OS8 update (to RISC OS 5.21 14-Feb-2015) the RAMFS size can be up to 520195kbytes. So is there a setting somewhere in !Boot that allows this? It does make sense on a machine with 1Gbyte of RAM to allow up to half to be a RAM disc.

ROM unpack and compile time using RAMFS goes down to 41s (unpack) and 4m54s (compile) so it is a worthwhile option…

What’s to say that R-Comp aren’t using a custom ROM?

Ah! I thought it must be hard-coded.. Edit: because I couldn’t find any setting in !Boot that would increase the limit above 128Mbytes

It is hard-coded :-) The value is specified in the source code, and cannot be changed at runtime. That’s what being hard-coded means.