3 ms·
Well the way you use memory in a game is non deterministic, so "OS having time to free memory" is not a good enough answer. Once the memory is made available t
by ankhmoop 17y ago
Well the way you use memory in a game is non deterministic, so "OS having time to free memory" is not a good enough answer.
Once the memory is made available to the foremost application, it will not be reclaimed by the operating system; As a game author you do not need to attempt to introduce determinism across all allocations, but instead ensure that initial allocations are not so rapid as to outpace the low-memory handling.
Also , maybe someone around here knows, or my question is stupid, but why isn't a virtual memory mechanism implemented into the iphone OS?
The OS does have a VM, it simply does not have swap space allocated to support paging to disk (flash). Paging would introduce a considerably less enjoyable user experience than forcing applications to account for the available RAM, and significantly decrease flash lifetime.
- kqr2 17y agoThe OS does have a VM, it simply does not have swap space allocated to support paging to disk (flash). Paging would introduce a considerably less enjoyable user experience than forcing applications to account for the available RAM. Just curious, can swap space be enabled on a jailbroken iphone?
- ankhmoop 17y agoJust curious, can swap space be enabled on a jailbroken iphone? The iPhoneOS doesn't ship with dynamic_pager, which implements user-space allocation and enabling of page files, but in theory, the necessary kernel support should be available. Enabling paging to a specific file is done via the macx_swapon syscall: http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/bsd/vm/dp_backing_file.c?v=xnu-1228#L157 http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/bsd/vm/dp_backing_file.c?v=... dynamic_pager handles allocation of swap files on-demand (requires free ADC account): http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.0/system_cmds-175/dynamic_pager.tproj/ http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.0/system_cmd...
- barrkel 17y agoYes. Instead of the "less enjoyable" experience of paging, we have the totally appletastic experience of disappearing applications, without warning.
- Tichy 17y agoIn a way, why does it matter if it has paging or not? Either way the total memory available is limited (hard disks don't have infinite storage space).