HatariWii/doc/memory-usage.txt

HATARI MEMORY USAGE

Here are some stats on Hatari v1.2+ memory usage (on Linux) and what
could be done to decrease it.

First the binary size from "size ./hatari":
   text    data      bss       dec
1489120   12828 18799688  20301636

I.e. the Hatari binary size is 1.4MB, it has 12KB of non-const/pre-defined
arrays and 18MB of uninitialized (at build-time) fixed size arrays.
The names of latter are listed below.

To decrease the binary size slightly, disable DSP from src/Makefile,
don't enabled tracing in config.h (latter may have trivial improvement
on speed too).  You may also try the gcc "-Os" or "-O3 -finline-limit=..."
options, their effect depends on the architecture for which Hatari is
being compiled.


To see the objects in the Hatari 18MB BSS section, get the datadump
script from here:
     http://live.gnome.org/MemoryReduction_2fTools

Compile Hatari without stripping, and use:
     datadump.py -n -s .bss -r ./hatari

As a result you see these array variables:
16777216 STRam hatari
  404400 dsp_core hatari
  324048 CyclePalettes hatari
  262144 mem_banks hatari
  262144 cpufunctbl hatari
  176612 ConfigureParams hatari
  131072 pInterceptWriteTable hatari
  131072 pInterceptReadTable hatari
   69632 InternalDTAs hatari
   65536 ymout5_u16 hatari
   32768 MixBuffer hatari
   32768 DspOutBuffer hatari
   ...

These empty arrays aren't an issue unless Hatari actually writes to
them, but that will happen as Hatari uses them.  Here are some ways
to minimize dirtying of the related memory i.e. use of the arrays
in Hatari:

* Enabling only required amount of memory for the emulation.
  Hatari doesn't dirty (zero) all of STRam, just the part of the ST ram
  that user has configured (accessible as ST ram, 0.5-14MB) and 2MB
  at the top (used as IO-memory, TOS and cartridge memory).

* Disabling DSP from build gets rid of dsp_core

* Modifying Video_ClearOnVBL() and Video_ColorReg_WriteWord()
  to call Spec512 functions only when nSpec512Threshold configuration
  value is non-zero and run Hatari with spec512 support disabled.
  This gets rid of CyclePalettes dirtying

* ConfigureParams size can be decreased 22*4KB by setting
  MAX_HARDDRIVES in configuration.h to one (or by removing
  memset from Configuration_SetDefault() as static variables in .bss
  are zeroed already by kernel, memset()ting them just makes them
  dirty and Configuration_SetDefault() is called only at Hatari startup).


When I profiled Hatari with Valgrind (valgrind.kde.org) Massif plugin,
it tells that Hatari does about 3MB of memory worth of dynamic
allocations. The allocations and ways to make them smaller are:

* In includes/vdi.h decrease MAX_VDI_WIDTH and MAX_VDI_HEIGHT
  to 640 and 400. As Hatari allocates 2*2 framebuffers (of size
  width*height/8) for page flipping in Screen_Init(), decreasing
  their size can have have a large effect.

* Do not load bigfont in gui-sdl/sdlgui.c, especially if the device
  screen is smaller than VGA.  Both fonts together take about 1/3 MB.

* Change uncompressed file read to use mmap() instead, currently
  memory is allocated for the whole disk image before reading it.
  - With normal DD floppy image Hatari would use that amount which
    might be acceptable, but with e.g. 2MB disk needed for running
    Wolf3D v0.8, mmap() sounds much better
  - For compressed disk images memory needs to be allocated for
    uncompressed image data, i.e. there we cannot save memory.

* Check whether the m86k instruction table could be made smaller:
        #include "uae-cpu/readcpu.h"
        printf("%d -> %d\n", sizeof(struct instr), sizeof(struct instr) * 65536);
  On x86 it's slightly over 1MB.

You can also Massif Hatari yourself, its allocation calltrees
are very short & the allocations are easy to find in the Hatari
source code.


From /proc/sysvipc/shm one can see how much shared memory Hatari/libSDL
has allocated and that it shares it with the X server:
- >100KB in lowrez
- ~200KB in lowrez with borders
- ~500KB in monochrome or zoomed lowrez
- >800KB in zoomed lowrez with borders

I don't think these could be made smaller from the code. Besides,
user can just use a the smaller Hatari screen mode in fullscreen and
let the display scale it to fullscreen.


According to Xrestop, Hatari doesn't keep any Pixmap resources
at the X server side.


Finally when looking at the Hatari process with "pmap", you can
see that the libraries Hatari links don't use so much private
(writable) memory, only couple of hundred KB:
    pmap $(pidof hatari) | grep / | grep rw

To see how much from the memory pmap tells Hatari to have allocated is
actually used/dirtied, take a peek at: /proc/$(pidof hatari)/smaps.

Of the rest of the 40MB Hatari VMSIZE you see in "top" (about 16MB),
half is unused/clean 8MB memory (allocated by kernel for the SDL sound
thread stack) and half goes to shared library code (their .text
sections with "r-x" rights) that Hatari links against.  The libraries
are most likely used also by other programs and even if they aren't,
it's memory mapped read-only / read in on-demand pages & pagable back
to disk so it's shouldn't be much of a problem either.


Unmodified Hatari runs on (Linux) systems having about 20MB of _free_
memory (e.g. according to /proc/meminfo free+buffers+cached fields)
and more RAM in total than the Hatari VMSIZE.

Using low-rez without borders nor zooming, setting emulated ST memory
amount to <=1MB, limiting the VDI screen size, disabling DSP and
removing bigfont (discussed with Massif findings above) should enable
running Hatari well on a system with only 10MB free memory, if it's
otherwise fast enough.


	- Eero Tamminen

PS. Any device fast enough to run Hatari at reasonable speed
should already have enough memory for it...