101–110 of 174 posts
This should be a basic requirement for all games. Even before I was married my mom would call or someone would ring the doorbell. And when I was a kid I had to go down to dinner or take out the trash.
That reminds me of the old "Supervisor Key" in classic early games.
"I've already gotten great value out of the program, as there are lots of cut scenes in The Witcher 3, that I don't want to skip." The Witcher 3 pauses cutscenes when the window is not in focus. So the example is probably not the greatest.
My son has been playing Witcher 3 for the last few weeks, and literally every time I walk by, there's a cutscene. I'm pretty sure I have yet to see anything but cutscenes. It's all cutscenes. Listening to it in the background, it sounds more like an episode of Sons of Anarchy than a traditional videogame.
In that case, after unpausing, the animation would just skip ahead.
As a remedy, the pause button could also stop the system clock as seen by the process.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too" Every once in a while I am reminded how wonderful, and perhaps unlikely, it is that I have a nice, slick, mass market consumer device (apple computer running OS X) that is honest to god UNIX underneath. And then sad, knowing that this is a brief golden age that will probably pass.
Don't say that... why would Apple change the underlyings of OS X? Blasphemy :(
You can do this to any process in Windows' Resource Monitor too - the one you can open from task manager. On the CPU tab you can right click any process and suspend it.
not seeing this in Windows 7. Is this specific to Windows 8 and above?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
SIGSTOP and SIGCONT are generic Unix signals. Where it gets more interesting is using elaborate checkpoint/restore [1] mechanisms for processes to serialize their state (open fds, watches, IPC, etc.) into an image that can then be overlayed, remotely executed, debugged and so forth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_checkpointing
I've always thought this was a wrongheaded solution. I mean, of course, we have these apps that splay themselves all over global system resources in complex ways, and so we need to track down how they've done that, record it, and then replay it later to restore them. It's necessary. But imagine a well-behaved classical X11 app, running in something like a VM or Docker container. You execute its launcher, the VM spins…
C/R enables complete persistence by duplicating a process from its image, which can cut initialization and startup times by orders of magnitude, and resume service from an exact position with zero downtime, and not just basic mechanisms like socket superservers.
It lets you back up process state at any arbitrary moment, send it over the network, recalculate and reexec immediately and then thaw again for debugging it from that particular point.
It just helps enable live migrations and zero downtime recoordinations with far less complicated redundancy schemes. This includes containers. On top of it being a universal save/pause button.
Depending on the robustness of the image format, it can be made space efficient through deduplication.
C/R is quite invaluable for any scenario that involves fault tolerance, high response times, tracking down difficult bugs, low startup overhead and so on. I'm surprised why it's still such an obscure technique.
Besides, I don't think the primary use case here is even graphical apps (not that they don't work just fine). What you really want is a local indexed copy of all the execution environment details, like pipes, sockets, timers, ttys, timers, sigmasks, *fds, etc. for infrastructure.
This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too (by name via killall, and by PID via kill): kill -STOP 1234 kill -CONT 1234 killall -STOP -c "Pandora" killall -CONT -c "Pandora" A more nuanced control is to throttle down the CPU, via cputhrottle[1]. If I'm running a CPU-intensive calculation and don't want to bog down the rest of my system I will use it to give me enough cycles for Sublime Text to wor…
"This is nice! On OSX, processes can be paused and continued too" Every once in a while I am reminded how wonderful, and perhaps unlikely, it is that I have a nice, slick, mass market consumer device (apple computer running OS X) that is honest to god UNIX underneath. And then sad, knowing that this is a brief golden age that will probably pass.
> How can operating systems research be relevant when the resulting operating systems are all indistinguishable?
> There was a claim in the late 1970s and early 1980s that Unix had killed operating systems research because no one would try anything else. At the time, I didn’t believe it. Today, I grudgingly accept that the claim may be true (Microsoft notwithstanding).
> A victim of its own success: portability led to ubiquity. That meant architecture didn’t matter, so now there’s only one. Linux is the hot new thing... but it’s just another Unix.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
not seeing this in Windows 7. Is this specific to Windows 8 and above?
From Task Manager, open Resource Monitor. That's the one with green charts on the right hand side. It has different context menu than the Task Manager. Picture (on windows 8): http://thewindowsclub.thewindowsclubco.netdna-cdn.com/wp-con... I'm not sure if Windows 7 has it, though.
Or run `perfmon /res`.
