Recherche avancée

Sur d’autres sites (4714)

• Programming Language Levels

  20 mai 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Programming

  I’ve been doing this programming thing for some 20 years now. Things sure do change. One change I ponder from time to time is the matter of programming language levels. Allow me to explain.

  The 1990s
  When I first took computer classes in the early 1990s, my texts would classify computer languages into 3 categories, or levels. The lower the level, the closer to the hardware ; the higher the level, the more abstract (and presumably, easier to use). I recall that the levels went something like this :

  • High level : Pascal, BASIC, Logo, Fortran
  • Medium level : C, Forth
  • Low level : Assembly language

  Keep in mind that these were the same texts which took the time to explain the history of computers from mainframes -> minicomputers -> a relatively recent phenomenon called microcomputers or "PCs".

  Somewhere in the mid-late 1990s, when I was at university, I was introduced to a new tier :

  • Very high level : Perl, shell scripting

  I think there was some debate among my peers about whether C++ and Java were properly classified as high or very high level. The distinction between high and very high, in my observation, seemed to be that very high level languages had more complex data structures (at the very least, a hash / dictionary / associative array / key-value map) built into the language, as well as implicit memory management.

  Modern Day
  These days, the old hierarchy is apparently forgotten (much like minicomputers). I observe that there is generally a much simpler 2-tier classification :

  • Low level : C, assembly language
  • High level : absolutely every other programming language in wide use today

  I find myself wondering where C++ and Objective-C fit in this classification scheme. Then I remember that it doesn’t matter and this is all academic.

  Relevancy
  I think about this because I have pretty much stuck to low-level programming all of my life, mostly due to my interest in game and multimedia-type programming. But the trends in computing have favored many higher level languages and programming paradigms. I woke up one day and realized that the kind of work I often do — lower level stuff — is not very common.

  I’m not here to argue that low or high level is superior. You know I’m all about using the appropriate tool for the job. But I sometimes find myself caught between worlds, having the defend and explain one to the other.

  • On one hand, it’s not unusual for the multitudes of programmers working at the high level to gasp and wonder why I or anyone else would ever use C or assembly language for anything when there are so many beautiful high level languages. I patiently explain that those languages have to be written in some other language (at first) and that they need to run on some operating system and that most assuredly won’t be written in a high level language. For further reading, I refer them to Joel Spolsky’s great essay called Back to Basics which describes why it can be useful to know at least a little bit about how the computer does what it does at the lowest levels.
  • On the other hand, believe it or not, I sometimes have to defend the merits of high level languages to my low level brethren. I’ll often hear variations of, "Any program can be written in C. Using a high level language to achieve the same will create a slow and bloated solution." I try to explain that the trade-off in time to complete the programming task weighed against the often-negligible performance hit of what is often an I/O-bound operation in the first place makes it worthwhile to use the high level language for a wide variety of tasks.

    Or I just ignore them. That’s actually the best strategy.

• Anomalie #4107 (Nouveau) : Warning Zend OPcache

  2 mars 2018, par Mathieu L

  Je travaille sur un serveur qui n’est pas le mien (que je n’ai pas configuré et sur lequel je n’ai pas la main), désolé si cette demande n’est pas suffisamment précise.

  OPcache est activé sur le serveur, le formulaire de login à /ecrire/ me renvoie le warning suivant :
  

  Warning : Zend OPcache API is restricted by "restrict_api" configuration directive in /srv/users/xxx/apps/yyy/public/ecrire/inc/flock.php on line 468
  

  
  Impossible ensuite de se connecter (headers already sent).
  En rendant silencieux l’appel à l’invalidation d’OPcache ça fonctionne.
  

  @opcache_invalidate($filepath, true) ;

• Dreamcast Serial Extractor

  31 décembre 2017, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  It has not been a very productive year for blogging. But I started the year by describing an unfinished project that I developed for the Sega Dreamcast, so I may as well end the year the same way. The previous project was a media player. That initiative actually met with some amount of success and could have developed into something interesting if I had kept at it.

  By contrast, this post describes an effort that was ultimately a fool’s errand that I spent way too much time trying to make work.

  Problem Statement
  In my neverending quest to analyze the structure of video games while also hoarding a massive collection of them (though I’m proud to report that I did play at least a few of them this past year), I wanted to be able to extract the data from my many Dreamcast titles, both games and demo discs. I had a tool called the DC Coder’s Cable, a serial cable that enables communication between a Dreamcast and a PC. With the right software, you could dump an entire Dreamcast GD-ROM, which contained a gigabyte worth of sectors.

  Problem : The dumping software (named ‘dreamrip’ and written by noted game hacker BERO) operated in a very basic mode, methodically dumping sector after sector and sending it down the serial cable. This meant that it took about 28 hours to extract all the data on a single disc by running at the maximum speed of 115,200 bits/second, or about 11 kilobytes/second. I wanted to create a faster method.

  The Pitch
  I formed a mental model of dreamrip’s operation that looked like this :

  
  
  

  As an improvement, I envisioned this beautiful architecture :
  

  
  
  

  Architectural Assumptions
  My proposed architecture was predicated on the assumption that the disc reading and serial output functions were both I/O-bound operations and that the CPU would be idle much of the time. My big idea was to use that presumably idle CPU time to compress the sectors before sending them over the wire. As long as the CPU can compress the data faster than 11 kbytes/sec, it should be a win. In order to achieve this, I broke the main program into 3 threads :

  1. The first thread reads the sectors ; more specifically, it asks the drive firmware to please read the sectors and make the data available in system RAM
  2. The second thread waits for sector data to appear in memory and then compresses it
  3. The third thread takes the compressed data when it is ready and shuffles it out through the serial cable

  Simple and elegant, right ?

  For data track compression, I wanted to start with zlib in order to prove the architecture, but then also try bzip2 or lzma. As long as they could compress data faster than the serial port could write it, then it should be a win. For audio track compression, I wanted to use the Flake FLAC encoder. According to my notes, I did get both bzip2 compression and the Flake compressor working on the Dreamcast. I recall choosing Flake over the official FLAC encoder because it was much simpler and had fewer dependencies, always an important consideration for platforms such as this.

  Problems
  I worked for quite awhile on this project. I have a lot of notes recorded but a lot of the problems I had remain a bit vague in my memory. However, there was one problem I discovered that eventually sunk the entire initiative :

  The serial output operation is CPU-bound.

  My initial mental model was that the a buffer could be “handed off” to the serial subsystem and the CPU could go back to doing other work. Nope. Turns out that the CPU was participating at every step of the serial transfer.

  Further, I eventually dug into the serial driver code and learned that there was already some compression taking place via the miniLZO library.

  Lessons Learned

  • Recognize the assumptions that you’re making up front at the start of the project.
  • Prototype in order to ensure plausibility
  • Profile to make sure you’re optimizing the right thing (this is something I have learned again and again).

  Another interesting tidbit from my notes : it doesn’t matter how many sectors you read at a time, the overall speed is roughly the same. I endeavored to read 1000 2048-byte data sectors, 1 or 10 or 100 at a time, or all 1000 at once. My results :

  • 1 : 19442 ms
  • 10 : 19207 ms
  • 100 : 19194 ms
  • 1000 : 19320 ms

  No difference. That surprised me.

  Side Benefits
  At one point, I needed to understand how BERO’s dreamrip software was operating. I knew I used to have the source code but I could no longer find it. Instead, I decided to try to reverse engineer what I needed from the SH-4 binary image that I had. It wasn’t an ELF image ; rather, it was a raw binary meant to be loaded at a particular memory location which makes it extra challenging for ‘objdump’. This led to me asking my most viewed and upvoted question on Stack Overflow : “Disassembling A Flat Binary File Using objdump”. The next day, it also led me to post one of my most upvoted answers when I found the solution elsewhere.

  Strangely, I have since tried out the command line shown in my answer and have been unable to make it work. But people keep upvoting both the question and the answer.

  Eventually this all became moot when I discovered a misplaced copy of the source code on one of my computers.

  I strongly recall binging through the Alias TV show while I was slogging away on this project, so I guess that’s a positive association since I got so many fun screenshots out of it.

  The Final Resolution
  Strangely, I was still determined to make this project work even though the Dreamcast SD adapter arrived for me about halfway through the effort. Part of this was just stubbornness, but part of it was my assumptions about serial port speeds, in particular, my assumption that there was a certain speed-of-light type of limitation on serial port speeds so that the SD adapter, operating over the DC’s serial port, would not be appreciably faster than the serial cable.

  This turned out to be very incorrect. In fact, the SD adapter is capable of extracting an entire gigabyte disc image in 35-40 minutes. This is the method I have since been using to extract Dreamcast disc images.

  The post Dreamcast Serial Extractor first appeared on Breaking Eggs And Making Omelettes.