On 12.11.2004, at 01:13, Steve Stavropoulos wrote:
If the OS has better virtual memory than what available to gimp, then you would want to use that one. In Linux, I think in most cases, you would want to use the (often in multiple disks) swap partitions/files available to the OS.
GIMP does tile swapping by hand, so if you hit the limits you'll get a lot of files in the .gimp directory of your homedirectory or whatever you set the swap area to.
I once tried to modify this to have the tile cache use mmap memory with file backing to truly let the OS decide where to put the tiles (memory or file), however this was a really sad performer so I ditched the code.
I wonder whether photoshop works with tiles at all or simply uses a linear memory segment and let the OS do the rest.
It would be really cool if the pixel data addressing was pluggable so one could easily write a different storage backend. On top of my head there would be several schemes I'd like to try: - A simple linear memory segment with COW for new layers - dito but with RLE compression (and thus more complex addressing) - Line based addressing with COW and aliasing for duplicate lines, with LUT for each line - Planar memory segments (Shoot now! ;))
I don't know what GEGL will buy us exactly because we certainly need a change from "store those 32bit RGBA values" to something more variable but IIRC GEGL is only about pixel composition, not storage.
Servus,
Daniel
Attachment:
PGP.sig
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
