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Show HN: Universal Pause Button

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Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#91

Post by leni536 »

ars wrote: post #44
tomkinstinch wrote: post #33

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…

On debian the program is cpulimit.

I think using nice or renice is better practice. Hard throttling is way more inefficient.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#92

Post by toxicFork »

SCHiM wrote: post #15
RyanRies wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have thought about this. In fact I even asked Gabe Newell about whether the use of this program might falsely trigger some anti-cheat mechanism within Steam. (He hasn't replied yet.) So, I guess until I get more official information, please proceed with caution and use at your own risk. That being said, that would imply that using Process Explorer or PsSuspend could also get you banned, since those applications als…

Yeah do be very careful with this, many anti-cheat programs are very trigger-happy. Some time ago I had an application crash on a development machine while I was playing a game. On my dev machine crashes go straight to ollydbg. Next thing I know I'm kicked from the game, and it tells me to stop 'using cheat programs'. Go figure :p

Heh, spotify did this too, if you had any debugger running then it would just instantly shut down. It probably still does it.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#94

Post by derefr »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #54
tomkinstinch wrote: post #33

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…

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 up in the background, the app launches in the VM, and the app's X11 client connects to the X11 server you're staring at and displays things.

If we truly want to sandbox apps, wouldn't it make more sense to move more toward a model like that—one where you have a discrete "application backend process" running in a sandbox, and you can just chuck around the sandbox itself willy-nilly (freezing it, thawing it, copying it, etc.) because it has well-defined connection-points to the host?

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#96

Post by derefr »

samspot wrote: post #24

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.

Years ago, I wondered why hypervisor-level pause (and memory snapshots, for that matter) weren't just expected features for game consoles.

These days I can at least hit the Home button on a Wii U game and expect it to work. Emulators are still hogging save-states all to themselves, though.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#97

Post by bbcbasic »

rsync wrote: post #69
tomkinstinch wrote: post #33

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.

Don't worry. Linux is slicker.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#98

Post by s_kilk »

ConAntonakos wrote: post #42
jerf wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I encountered this problem with babies. They definitely don't pause. My solution was the DS/3DS line of consoles... snap 'em shut, bam, paused. I've called them the consoles of choice for the discriminating father. (If you've never had kids and find yourself wondering what horrible father would be playing video games while taking care of his children, well, you see, it turns out that sometimes your child wants to sle…

Does the Xbox One not do this? I mean suspend gameplay and resume with just a touch of a button?

I believe the PS4 does this too.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#99

Post by cookiecaper »

rsync wrote: post #69
tomkinstinch wrote: post #33

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.

Many would argue the golden age of OS X and nix compatibility has already passed. The last time I seriously used OS X was 10.4, but every release I hear about another set of nix compatibilities getting chipped away.

Re: Show HN: Universal Pause Button

#100

Post by schiffern »

arthurcolle wrote: post #75
rsync wrote: post #69

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 :(

The precedent is already set. iOS is underlain by the same components, but the end user has no access.

We have also seen an incremental approach in the gradual replacement of open APIs/components with closed ones.

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