Re: Paging ASD example files - where are they?

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Daniel Williams (dwilliams++at++sarnoff.com)
Tue, 30 Jun 1998 17:47:46 -0400

William J. Feth wrote:
>
> Hello all,
> I have been looking for a way to write out a file containing an ASD
> node and then have perfly recognize and load it. I discovered in the
> pfdBuildASD man page that such an algorithm is included w/ the pf2.2
> distribution and is loosely documented.
> There are a couple ways to do this- one is to write out a bunch of page
> files, correct? This is the one refered to in the example given in the
> pfdBuildASD man page. I do not necessarily want to use this page file
> method in the end, but at this point, I just want to be able to make
> _some_ kind of ASD file and see it show up in perfly.
> Any pointers on how to read in ASD page files (does anyone have
> page.config?) or how to write and read other types of ASD files would be
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks for your time,
> -Bill Feth
>
Here's how far I got before giving up on ASD.

I first generate a gently undulating SGI format luminance image like so:

    /usr/sbin/dotgen /tmp/foo0.bw 1024 2.0 2.0
    /usr/sbin/conimg /tmp/foo1.bw 1024 1024 128
    /usr/sbin/max /tmp/foo0.bw /tmp/foo1.bw /tmp/foo2.bw
    /usr/sbin/greyscale /tmp/foo3.bw 1024 1024 12
    /usr/sbin/blend /tmp/foo2.bw /tmp/foo3.bw terrain.bw 0.8
    rm -f /tmp/foo?.bw

I then use the instructions contained in the manual page
pfdBuildASD(3pf) to try to convert that image into a paging pfASD
database:

    setenv PFNFYLEVEL 7
    setenv PFSHAREDSIZE 536870912
    buildbw terrain.bw tile config page
    convasd config page

The problem is that the first step silently fails (apparently) by not
writing out all the tiles that the second step expects: when I run the
'convasd' command I get 308 messages of the form "can't open file
tile09001002".

However, you can use the following config file:
------cut--------asdfly.config------cut--------
2
1.953125e-3 0.0 0.0 0.0
0.0 1.953125e-3 0.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 1.0 0.0
0.0 0.0 0.0 1.0
terrain.bw
config page
0.0 0.0 1000.0
0.0 0.0 0.0
------cut--------asdfly.config------cut--------

and read it in into asdfly:

    asdfly asdfly.config

and get something. It just has lots of data missing.

I opened this as a call to the TAC two months ago and it took them
about a month and a half to compile their own sample code. They couldn't
reproduce my results because buildbw coredumps for them. They reminded
me that this is unsupported software and to try posting to info-performer.
Case closed.

The final straw was when I read this statement in the release notes:
"pfASD has memory leaks in the database paging. Your application may run
out of memory after several ASD tiles paging." If this is true it makes
any other problems irrelevent. I asked for more information
about this problem and when it might be fixed two months ago in the same
call; no answer yet.

I hope you have better luck.

Dan

--
Daniel Williams, Systems & Scientific Software
Voice: (215) 885-1573 Email: sass++at++acm.com
Independent Consultant to: Sarnoff Corporation
Voice: (609) 734-2153 Email: dwilliams++at++sarnoff.com
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