RAMMeasuringContest

  • Created: 2009-03-30

  • Contributors: JohnMoser

  • Packages affected: quake

Summary

Ship a miniature version of Ubuntu designed to run from LiveCD and only execute Quake 1 with some basic (Free) levels, in as little RAM as possible.

Release Note

Ubuntu now includes a proof-of-concept low-memory-usage release, designed to measure memory usage against a mid-90s task baseline.

Rationale

In 1998, a PC running Windows 98 with 32MB of RAM and under 50MB of Swap could easily play 8 player Quake network games, or single-player games, with no hardware 3D acceleration. This makes an appropriate baseline for testing the memory footprint of loading up Xorg and running a simple program.

Use Cases

Completely developer-oriented testing.

Assumptions

Many?

Design

A simple Ubuntu base system running all necessary services, with Xorg and a simple window manager (IceWM-light possibly). Exotic changes are unnecessary, as this test can simply be run inside a Virtual Machine to examine memory pressure.

Implementation

Code Changes

The selected application (Quake) existed and was popularly used in 1998 with known system specifications (32M of RAM, with some online services recommending 50M of Swap, on Windows 98). The selected application has not been ported verbatim to x86-64, however; enhanced versions such as Dark Places exist, but they add features and heavily utilize the 3D graphics hardware and memory, and make a bad comparison. If one wants to test x86-64 platforms, then a verbatim Quake or QuakeWorld port to x86-64 must be acquired somehow, or another program from that era must be chosen for a known baseline.

Also, a program to continuously monitor memory usage (similar to bootchart) should be written.

Test/Demo Plan

This entire specification aims to provide a test for the basic memory pressure Ubuntu experiences performing a common task from about 1 decade ago.

Unresolved issues

Nobody is actually going to want to do this.

BoF agenda and discussion


CategorySpec

RAMMeasuringContest (last edited 2009-03-30 21:29:02 by ssanccfw)