MiniGL watchdog priority

Hello,

First of all, Admins what about a MiniGL thread in the forums here?


When I run Celestia, the system crawls down a lot.
I've seen with Scout that the watchdog process has a priority of 50 (!) which is far superior to input.device

Can it be lowered?

@Elwood

The watchdog thread's priority could be lowered, but it won't help lower CPU usage. The Watchdog thread uses up hardly any CPU time at all. It's priority is set so high so that it gets CPU time when it needs it, not when it's too late.

Celestia uses up 100% CPU time because it uses as much CPU time as it can get its hands on. It has a tight loop that checks for events, performs animation tasks and redraws the screen.

A lot of glut-based applications do this.

Hans

@Hans

Does it mean that nothing can be done about it?

@Elwood

If you don't want to slow down Celestia, yes, there is nothing that you can do. You could lower the priority of Celestia, but that would slow it down. Likewise, Afxgroup could add a delay into the Celestia main loop; this would also slow down Celestia.

Hans

@Hans

on the other hand it's a bit dangerous to have tasks with higher priority than input.device, if the task deadlocks or something you'd just get a hard freeze.

@COBRA

Quote:

The purpose of the MiniGL watchdog timer is to limit the maximum period of time that the Warp3D context is locked so that things such as audio get a better chance to run. Lowering the priority risks causing more audio crackling issues. Right now almost no OpenGL app has any audio issues on my A1; I'd like to keep it that way.

Hans

@Hans

So locking the hardware causes other tasks like one playing audio to be suspended? Does it have to be that way? Coudln't it be done with a semaphore?

@COBRA

Quote:

It's not disabling multitasking or anything like that. I'm not sure exactly what it does, but it does make it harder for the audio thread to access the PCI bus. The problem is the slow transfer mode of commands to the graphics card makes it a real PCI bus hog. Forcibly unlocking it gives the audio drivers a chance.

Hans