Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

How many people still use old Archos devices?

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JdGordon:
Rasher did a bunch of work building every build ever and checking ram usages.. http://rasher.dk/rockbox/graphs/ that graph is really hard to read but the raw data is there so maybe you might want to generate the graph for just hwcodec?

Like I said before, if you dont care about looks and customisability there is a TON of code that can be stripped (including all the menus!)

dreamlayers:
Thanks for the link to the graph!

In a list of sizes from rockbox.map, the main things that stand out are the database, skin engine, and unicode.o. However, most of what's used by the skin engine, and the vast majority of unicode.o are bss. I wonder if the new allocation code means these can now be easily allocated from the buffer as needed.

Considering everything except bss, the skin engine still seems like a good candidate for removal. I'm not sure what you mean by stripping all the menus.  Yes, apps/menus uses 11k, but menus are necessary for performing various functions. I guess settings menus could be removed for RomBox, and then settings could be changed by loading a full-featured copy from disc. I'm not sure if that would be annoying.

gbl08ma:
I no developer nor Rockbox expert, and I don't even own a HWCODEC target, but in the quality of frequent Rockbox user ( :) ), I'd like to say that I'm in favor of a stripped down version (that would go into a separate branch). This "derivative" of Rockbox could be created from the source of a stable release, and stripped down from there, as some people suggest.

I also suggest that this lightweight version not only applies to hwcodec targets, but to all the targets; why? Well, I feel that for this year and a half that I've been using Rockbox, my player has been constantly loosing buffer ("free") RAM: in May 2009, it was something around 28.7MB, now (build not older than a week) and with the same features enabled (dircache, database), I get 27.3MB or 27.2MB for audio buffer.
I also have the impression the battery life of my iPod has decreased, and Rockbox has a more frequent/intensive memory access (perhaps also because of the audio buffer size decrease).
Buflib, advanced skin engine and everything is very nice, but the fact is that I (and certainly many users, specially those of slower/older targets, like the small Sansa Clips) feel that Rockbox is getting heavier and slower. A version without all the bells&whistles would be greatly appreciated even by me, using a "powerful" iPod Nano 2G.

The removal of the whole skin engine would be really useful both on old Archos and on the recent iPod - at the end, if you always use cabbiev2, does having a skin engine matter much? It's just slowing the device down. And the database and plugins are just taking binary size (important on players where Rockbox is installed to the ROM) if you don't care about them.

Even better if we could dual-boot between the normal and lightweight builds on the targets on which this is possible - but hey, I don't ask for that much! :)

The lightweight/hwcodec branch would only be updated with "known-good" code that would increase stability over the already existing features, and no new features would be added; some would be even removed (e.g. buflib in the core).
/* Personally, I think RB is much unstable since buflib was ported to the core, but I know it's not a finished work yet (or is it?) */
By other words, this means that hwcodec build would be like frozen in 3.9.1 or 3.8.1 forever; does the hardware still support much more bells&whistles than what these versions provide? If not, then it's better that we stop going forward with fanciness on that target; just freeze it with whatever version it is capable of running with stability, and let's move on to more powerful targets while keeping an eye on the light targets to make sure any remaining bugs with their branch are solved, and that they aren't missing any of the smaller features that can be implemented on them.
Why do you think Windows 7 doesn't run on my PC from 2002, and why do you think my laptop from two months ago runs the latest Windows? The same way, you cannot expect to run the hypothetical future Rockbox 5.2 on a Archos.

Eventually I'm just repeating half of what's been said on this thread; anyways, looking forward to a "Lightbox" to run on my iPod for those times I want 26 hours (or even more, who knows) playback and not a fancy skin, Rockboy or database.

Just my three cents...

saratoga:

--- Quote from: gbl08ma on November 07, 2011, 05:32:09 PM ---I also suggest that this lightweight version not only applies to hwcodec targets, but to all the targets; why? Well, I feel that for this year and a half that I've been using Rockbox, my player has been constantly loosing buffer ("free") RAM: in May 2009, it was something around 28.7MB, now (build not older than a week) and with the same features enabled (dircache, database), I get 27.3MB or 27.2MB for audio buffer.
--- End quote ---

According to the chart, during that time RAM usage increased by a few hundred KB, so I suspect a lot of that may be due to things like larger dircache or database, or just enabling dircache at all (it used to be off by default).


--- Quote from: gbl08ma on November 07, 2011, 05:32:09 PM ---The removal of the whole skin engine would be really useful both on old Archos and on the recent iPod - at the end, if you always use cabbiev2, does having a skin engine matter much? It's just slowing the device down.
--- End quote ---

While I know nothing about the skin engine, I suspect that without it displaying CabbieV2 would be very difficult.


--- Quote from: gbl08ma on November 07, 2011, 05:32:09 PM ---And the database and plugins are just taking binary size (important on players where Rockbox is installed to the ROM) if you don't care about them.
--- End quote ---

Plugins do not take up binary size (as they are not part of the binary), and you can easily disable the database at compile time if you don't want the code for it (which is not very large).


--- Quote from: gbl08ma on November 07, 2011, 05:32:09 PM ---Eventually I'm just repeating half of what's been said on this thread; anyways, looking forward to a "Lightbox" to run on my iPod for those times I want 26 hours (or even more, who knows) playback and not a fancy skin, Rockboy or database.

--- End quote ---

You're welcome to test it, but I doubt the difference is going to be more then a few minutes of battery life.  Nothing you've mentioned has more then a trivial impact on power consumption for modern targets.  But sure, by all means if you don't want features and it annoys you that you have plugins installed feel free to strip out whatever you like.  Its pointless, but also harmless. 

LambdaCalculus:
+1 for dreamlayers' pitch.

I'm not really using my Archos JBR very much either anymore (except as storage for my MP3 library), so forking out all the HWCODEC stuff and keeping Rockbox lean and mean for SWCODEC targets sounds like a good idea.

Perhaps we can start even doing that now that we've forked for 3.10 and keep 3.10 as the final version that will officially support the Archos devices?

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