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Article View: comp.sys.atari.st
Article #38912

The 4MB Clear-Time Blues

#38912
From: Allen King
Date: Fri, 19 May 1989 12:09
33 lines
1815 bytes
I'm tired of waiting for my 4 Meg to get zeroed every time I turn around.
What's a good program to make initialization faster? I've gotten this far:


   1. NULLFILL isn't very safe. I also can't find it on the net. Any
   ideas where I might locate it, presuming it has some value?

   2. TURBODOS seems to take less time zeroing, but I'm scared about its
   deferred write cache. How do you flush it?

   3. Does TOS1.4 solve this problem? Atari is no longer sending
   developers RAM TOS1.4's because the the ROM's "are a few weeks away"
   (but no committment when. (I hope that someday, perhaps in a future
   life, Jay Patton of Atari owns a machine that I designed.))  A good
   bboard list and some pointers would help a lot.


-> 4. I realize that tighter coding speeds up the clear loop. Has anybody
   coded a FASTFILL.PRG? Couldn't the amount of memory cleared also be
   limited to some value, say 1MB?  Wouldn't that catch most programs?
   Ergo FST1MFIL.PRG. Getting the sources for NULLFILL would be half
   the battle.


   I'm pissed that Atari's over performance in this area (clearing
more than just BSS, and providing what initially amounts to a
calloc'ing malloc) is being relied on by some programmers and it's
crippeling my machine. Not really any blame, just my blood boils every
time my disk stops spinning and I have to wait with a blank screen.



	   Prevent an Ulcer, Recommend a Program!
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!BBN.COM!aking
From: aking@BBN.COM (Allen King)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: The 4MB Clear-Time Blues
Message-ID: <8905191216.AA19248@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 19 May 89 12:09:53 GMT
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Organization: The Internet
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