What can be done to lower UE4Editor startup time? - performance

Status: the problem lowered, but compared to other users reports it persists.
I have moved to UE4.27.0 and the startup time lowered from 11 (v4.26.2) to 6 minutes! (the RAM usage lowered too!) But doesnt compare to the speed other ppl report "almost instantly"...
It is not compiling anything, not even shaders, it is like the 6th time I run it for one project.
Should I try to disable plugins? but Im new with UE and dont want to difficult my usage. Tho, for ex., I have nothing VR related to test so it could really be initially disabled.
HD READ SPEED? NO
I have tested moving UE4Editor whole engine path (100GB) to a 3xSSD(Stripes), but the UE4Editor startup time remained the same. My HD were it is too, is fast but not so fast as the 3xSSD.
CPU USAGE? MAY BE if it could use 4 cores could solve it?
UE4Editor startup uses A SINGLE CORE ONLY, i can confirm with htop and system monitor, it is possible to see only a single core being used 100% and it changes between the 4 cores, so only one is used at 100% per time.
I tested this command line parameter -USEALLAVAILABLECORES after the project URL for UE4Editor, but nothing changed. I read that option is ignored in some machines, so may be if I patch it's usage it could work on mine?
GPU? no?
a report about an integrated graphics card (weak one) says it doesnt interfere with the startup time.
LOG for UE4Editor v4.27.0 with the new biggest intervals ("..." means ommited log lines to make it easier to read; "!(interval in seconds)" is just to easy reading it (no ommitted lines here)):
[2021.09.15-23.38.20:677][ 0]LogHAL: Linux SourceCodeAccessSettings: NullSourceCodeAccessor
!22s
[2021.09.15-23.38.42:780][ 0]LogTcpMessaging: Initializing TcpMessaging bridge
[2021.09.15-23.38.42:782][ 0]LogUdpMessaging: Initializing bridge on interface 0.0.0.0:0 to multicast group 230.0.0.1:6666.
!16s
[2021.09.15-23.38.58:158][ 0]LogPython: Using Python 3.7.7
...
[2021.09.15-23.39.01:817][ 0]LogImageWrapper: Warning: PNG Warning: Duplicate iCCP chunk
!75s
[2021.09.15-23.40.16:951][ 0]SourceControl: Source control is disabled
...
[2021.09.15-23.40.26:867][ 0]LogAndroidPermission: UAndroidPermissionCallbackProxy::GetInstance
!16s
[2021.09.15-23.40.42:325][ 0]LogAudioCaptureCore: Display: No Audio Capture implementations found. Audio input will be silent.
...
[2021.09.15-23.41.08:207][ 0]LogInit: Transaction tracking system initialized
!9s
[2021.09.15-23.41.17:513][ 0]BlueprintLog: New page: Editor Load
!23s
[2021.09.15-23.41.40:396][ 0]LocalizationService: Localization service is disabled
...
[2021.09.15-23.41.45:457][ 0]MemoryProfiler: OnSessionChanged
!13s
[2021.09.15-23.41.58:497][ 0]LogCook: Display: CookSettings for Memory: MemoryMaxUsedVirtual 0MiB, MemoryMaxUsedPhysical 16384MiB, MemoryMinFreeVirtual 0MiB, MemoryMinFreePhysical 1024MiB
SPECS:
I'm using ubuntu 20.04.
My CPU is 4 cores 3.6GHz.
GeForce GT 710 1GB.
Related question but for older UE4: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/987852/view.html

Unreal Engine needs a high-end pc with a lot of RAM, fast SSD's, a good CPU and a medium graphic card. First of all there are always some shaders that needs to be compiled from the engine, and a lot of assets to be loaded in the startup time. As I can see you're on Linux you are probably using a self-compiled Unreal Engine version.... not the best thing to do for a newbie, because this may cause several problems on load time, startup, compiling and a lot of other stuff. If it's the first times you're using Unreal, try using it on Windows, it's all easier.

Related

Why doesn't the Linux kernel see the cache sizes in the gem5 emulator in full system mode?

I want to play around with cache sizes in my gem5 simulator to see how it affects performance of programs, and possibly tune programs at runtime.
As a sanity check, I tried to check that the command lines arguments I used were working , and so I tried the various methods proposed at: https://superuser.com/questions/55776/finding-l2-cache-size-in-linux/1298808#1298808
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index2/size
getconf LEVEL2_CACHE_SIZE
But I observed that:
the file /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cache/index2/size does not exist
getconf is empty
Why is that?
I am certain however that the caches are being, since I've benchmarked simple programs, and the cycle counts increase when I decrease the caches.
For example, my base command is:
M5_PATH='/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/gem5/gem5-system' '/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/gem5/gem5/build/ARM/gem5.opt' '/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/gem5/gem5/configs/example/fs.py' --command-line='earlyprintk=pl011,0x1c090000 console=ttyAMA0 lpj=19988480 rw loglevel=8 mem=512MB root=/dev/sda nokaslr norandmaps printk.devkmsg=on printk.time=y' --disk-image='/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/buildroot/output.arm-gem5~/images/rootfs.ext2' --dtb-file='/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/gem5/gem5/system/arm/dt/armv7_gem5_v1_1cpu.dtb' --kernel='/data/git/linux-kernel-module-cheat/buildroot/output.arm-gem5~/build/linux-custom/vmlinux' --machine-type=VExpress_GEM5_V1 --num-cpus=1 --caches --l1d_size=1024 --l1i_size=1024 --l2cache --l2_size=1024 --l3_size=1024 --cpu-type=HPI
With those tiny caches, running the following:
m5 resetstats && dhrystone 10000 && m5 dumpstats
takes 175M cycles, and only 16M cycles if I use the exact same command but with huge caches of size 1024MB.
I observe a similar behavior for x86.
I'm using this testing infrastructure: https://github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/tree/05d8a324f74849f03404eb847f8da748e2e4502c#gem5-change-system-parameters which implies:
gem5 commit: fbe63074e3a8128bdbe1a5e8f6509c565a3abbd4
Linux kernel v4.15 with configuration: https://github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/blob/05d8a324f74849f03404eb847f8da748e2e4502c/kernel_config_arm-gem5
Related thread on the mailing list: http://gem5-users.gem5.narkive.com/4xVBlf3c/verify-cache-configuration
For comparison, QEMU v2.11.0 x86 did show the cache sizes, but not the ARM one.
Maybe for ARM we would need to modify the bootloaders to tell that to kernel? But I don't know how those things work very well:
https://github.com/gem5/gem5/blob/fbe63074e3a8128bdbe1a5e8f6509c565a3abbd4/system/arm/simple_bootloader/simple.S
https://github.com/gem5/gem5/blob/fbe63074e3a8128bdbe1a5e8f6509c565a3abbd4/system/arm/aarch64_bootloader/boot.S
I have been told that:
gem5 doesn't implement the cache size discovery registers.
The problem is that it is really hard to configure them in the general case, and they might not even be able to represent the hierarchy in gem5.

Call to ExAllocatePoolWithTag never returns

I am having some issues with my virtualHBA driver on Windows Server 2016. A ran the HLK crashdump support test. 3 times out of 10 the test passed. In those 3 failing tests, the crashdump hangs at 0% while taking Complete dump, or Kernel dump or minidump.
By kernel debugging my code, I found that the call to ExAllocatePoolWithTag() for buffer allocation never actually returns.
Below is the statement which never returns.
pDeviceExtension->pcmdbuf=(struct mycmdrsp *)ExAllocatePoolWithTag(NonPagedPoolCacheAligned,pcmdqSignalSize,((ULONG)'TA1'));
I searched on the web regarding this. However, all of the found pages are focusing on this function returning NULL which in my case never returns.
Any help on how to move forward would be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
You can't allocate memory in crash dump mode. You're running at HIGH_LEVEL with interrupts disabled and so you're calling this API at the wrong IRQL.
The typical solution for a hardware adapter is to set the RequestedDumpBufferSize in the PORT_CONFIGURATION_INFORMATION structure during the normal HwFindAdapter call. Then when you're called again in crash dump mode you use the CrashDumpRegion field to get your dump buffer allocation. You then need to write your own "crash dump mode only" allocator to allocate buffers out of this memory region.
It's a huge pain, especially given that it's difficult/impossible to know how much memory you're ultimately going to need. I usually calculate some minimal configuration overhead (i.e. 1 channel, 8 I/O requests at a time, etc.) and then add in a registry configurable slush. The only benefit is that the environment is stripped down so you don't need to be in your all singing, all dancing configuration.

What is a TRAMPOLINE_ADDR for ARM and ARM64(aarch64)?

I am writing a basic check-pointing mechanism for ARM64 using PTrace in order to do so I am using some code from cryopid and I found a TRAMPOLINE_ADDR macro like the following:
#define TRAMPOLINE_ADDR 0x00800000 /* 8MB mark */ for x86
#define TRAMPOLINE_ADDR 0x00300000 /* 3MB mark */ for x86_64
So when I read about trampolines it is something related to jump statements. But my questions is from where the above values came and what would the corresponding values for the ARM and ARM64 platform.
Thank you
Just read the wikipedia page.
There is nothing magic about a trampoline or certainly a particular address, any address where you can have code that executes can hold a trampoline. there are many use cases for them...for example
say you are booting off of a flash, a spi flash, running at some safe rate so that the chip boots for all users. But you want to increase the rate of the spi flash and the spi peripheral does not allow you to change while executing code. So you would copy some code to ram, that code boosts the spi flash rate to a faster rate so you can use and/or run the flash faster, then you bounce back to running from the flash. you have bounced or trampolined off of that little bit of code in ram.
you have a chip that boots from flash, but has the ability to re-map that address space to ram for example, so you copy some code to some other ram, branch to it that little bit of trampoline code remaps the address space, then bounces you back or bounces you to where the flash is now mapped to or whatever.
you will see the gnu linker sometimes add a small trampoline, say you compile some modules as thumb and some others for arm, you no longer have to use that interwork thing, the linker takes care of cleaning this up, it may add an instruction or two to trampoline you between modes, sometimes it modifies the code to just go where it needs to sometimes it modifies the code to branch link somewhere close and that somewhere close is a trampoline.
I assume there may be a need to do the same thing for aarch64 if/when switching to that mode.
so there should be no magic. your specific application might have one or many trampolines, and the one you are interested might not even be called that, but is probably application specific, absolutely no reason why there would be one address for everyone, unless it is some very rigid operating specific (again "application specific") thing and one specific trampoline for that operating system is at some DEFINEd address.

How can I shrink the OS region in RAM through U-boot?

From my understanding, after a PC/embedded system booted up, the OS will occupy the entire RAM region, the RAM will look like this:
Which means, while I'm running a program I write, all the variables, dynamic memory allocated in the stacks, heaps and etc, will remain inside the region. If I run firefox, paint, gedit, etc, they will also be running in this region. (Is this understanding correct?)
However, I would like to shrink the OS region. Below is an illustration of how I want to divide the RAM:
The reason that I want to do this is because, I want to store some data receive externally through the driver into the Custom Region at fixed physical location, then I will be able to access it directly from the user space without using copy_to_user().
I think it is possible to do that by configuring u-boot, but I have no experience in u-boot, can anyone give me some directions where to begin with, such as: do I need to modify the source of u-boot, or changing the environment variables of u-boot will be sufficient?
Or is there any alternative method of doing this?
Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!
p/s: I'm using TI ARM processor, and booting up from an SD card, I'm not sure if it matters.
The platform is ARM. min_addr and max_addr will not work on these platform since these are for Intel-only implementations.
For the ARM platform try to look at "mem=size#start" kernel parameter. Read up on Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt and arch/arm/kernel/setup.c. This option is available on most new Linux code base (ie. 2.6.XX).
You need to set the following parameters:
max_addr=some_max_physical
min_addr=some_min_physical
to be passed to the kernel through uboot in the 'bootargs' u-boot environment variable.
I found myself trying to do the opposite recently - in other words get Linux to use the additional memory in my system - although I'm using Barebox rather than u-boot on a OMAP4 platform.
I found (a bit to my surprise) that once the Barebox MLO first stage boot-loader was aware of the extra RAM, the kernel then detected and used it as well without any bootargs. Since the memory size is not passed anywhere on the boot-line, I can only assume the kernel inspects the memory mappings set up by the boot-loader to determine RAM size. This suggests that modifying your u-boot to not map all of the RAM is the way to go.
On the subject of boot-args, there was a time when you it was recommended that you mapped out a chunk of RAM (used by the frame buffer?) on OMAP4 systems, using the boot-line. It's still unclear whether this is still necessary.

what is the size of windows semaphore object?

How to find size of a semaphore object in windows?
I tried using sizeof() but we cannot give name of the sempahore object as an argument to sizeof. It has to be the handle. sizeof(HANDLE) gives us the size of handle and not semaphore.
This what is known as an "opaque handle.". There is no way to know how big it really is, what it contains or how any of the functions work internally. This gives Microsoft the ability to completely rewrite the implementation with each new version of Windows if they want to without worrying about breaking existing code. It's a similar concept to having a public and private interface to a class. Since we are not working on the Windows kernel, we only get to see the public interface.
Update:
It might be possible to get a rough idea of how big they are by creating a bunch and monitoring what happens to your memory usage in Process Explorer. However, since there is a good chance that they live in the kernel and not in user space, it might not show up at all. In any case, there are no guarantees about any other version of Windows, past or future, including patches/service packs.
It's something "hidden" from you. You can't say how big it is. And it's a kernel object, so it probably doesn't even live in your address space. It's like asking "how big is the Process Table?", or "how many MB is Windows wasting?".
I'll add that I have made a small test on my Windows 7 32 bits machine: 100000 kernel semaphores (with name X{number} with 0 <= number < 100000)) : 4 mb of kernel memory and 8 mb of user space (both measured with Task Manager). It's about 40 bytes/semaphore in kernel space and 80 bytes/semaphore in user space! (this in Win32... In 64 bits it'll probably double)

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