317 replies to this topic

[DunKnow]

Hmm, maybe all the 3D eyecandy stuff from Samsung is taking up the reserved part of the ram, such as the 3D cube, the samsung menu which loads up very fast once u click to activate them. If it is not loaded into the ram, it would not have appear so fast.

Edited by DunKnow, 30 November 2009 - 04:30 PM.

[johnchan]

wakeupneo, on Dec 1 2009, 00:15, said:

1) Most likely... Too much pagepool and others are the case I think.

2) Well... No. If you hard reset your device it just goes away. Most people don't even use it anyway.

3) We are talking about 256MB, not 4GB. The current limitation is very far...

1) Indeed. But even with a huge Pagepool... would it use up almost half of the available RAM like that?

2) As a suggestion... not a matter if you actually USE that function or not, but Samsung must run it anyway, so I'm guessing as a _possibility_ that they sort this function RANDOMLY within the 100Mb reserved RAM and put random chars all over the rest of the reserved RAM so no one can find that specific function carefully. This is again just guesswork, but if I was instructed to make such a function, I might do that too to try to obfuscate/hide that function.

3) Indeed, but I'm not familiar with the Saumsung chipset limitations. I know Windows Mobile itself has no problem going much higher to 512MB RAM, but I'm just suggesting that maybe its a Samsung limitation.

[TheGoDxxxx]

The second one sounds really dumb, but than again, the also thought it'd be a good idea to let the customer stick needles in that hole next to similar looking hole wich houses the sensible antenna

BTW, that function is completly useless, since its sending a sms everytime u boot up the phone or change from 2g to 3g. I got like 20 messages on my second number.

3.)
That would be false advertissing on my book. I mean, if u cant use 256 MB, dont put 256 MB in it. And most importantly dont tell people that it is a 256 MB device!

The really bad thing is, u cant even use the little ram samsung left us because as soon as u go beyound 40 MB, Windows goes Terminator on the background apps.

[fifd2005]

If you look at the available RAM from windows settings menu it shows that There is total 140.70 MB ram and there is 60-70 MB free ram after soft reset in WM 6.1
So windows reports that there is total 140 MB RAM in Omnia II. Windows cant see more. Rest of the RAM ıf there is such ram really doeasnt available to WM

[Breit]

johnchan, on Nov 30 2009, 17:09, said:

3) Hardware limitation:- You know how if you have a 32-bit Windows system like WinXP, and you have 4GB RAM installed, your system can only see/use about 3.2Gb RAM, and the rest is essentially "reserved"... ie. wasted?

it is a bit offtopic as well, but i just want to clear this: windows32 is indeed capable of adressing and using the whole 4gb, it is that just all adresses have to fit in the virtual 32-bit adress-space, which includes all pci-devices and their specific space as well in a pc. this includes the adressable graphics ram for instance and all the option roms for pci-controller/network controller etc, which are mapped into the 4gb adress space. there are techniques to circumvent this, but mainly for compatibility reasons this is often not used (e.g. pci 64bit adressing in a 32bit system).

so btt: i highly doubt that wm6.5 is not capable of using the whole 256mb (arm-11 is a 32bit cpu so 4gb should be adressable). maybe samsung is reserving so much ram for some kind of caching mechanism accessable only from inside the kernel. it seems that we have to wait for some custom cooked roms to make use of it.

can someone please check what other/similiar wm6.5 devices have to say about reserved memory? how is htc (e.g. with leo) handling this?

[lifemaximum]

DunKnow, on Dec 1 2009, 00:29, said:

Hmm, maybe all the 3D eyecandy stuff from Samsung is taking up the reserved part of the ram, such as the 3D cube, the samsung menu which loads up very fast once u click to activate them. If it is not loaded into the ram, it would not have appear so fast.

unlikely but probable , how do we go about removing that cube , i have no use for it.
where can we get a clean win mobile 6.5 without all these fancy stuff...??

Edited by lifemaximum, 30 November 2009 - 05:48 PM.

[TheGoDxxxx]

fifd2005, on Nov 30 2009, 18:30, said:

So windows reports that there is total 140 MB RAM in Omnia II. Windows cant see more. Rest of the RAM ıf there is such ram really doeasnt available to WM

How is that on other devices? Is it common for WM to not report the whole advertized ram or is this somethin entirely new so far?

Edited by TheGoDxxxx, 30 November 2009 - 06:47 PM.

[wurzelsepp]

Can't be the cube, on my omnia pro the same amount of ram is reserved,

I cant imagine that the reserved 120mb are useful for anything, what was Samsung thinking when doing this ???

I mean samsung makes the best hardware (AMOLED, and so on) 


but in terms of software they should invest more because the best hardware is nothing without good software.

Edited by wurzelsepp, 30 November 2009 - 06:43 PM.

[Tarqon]

nap_rz, on Nov 30 2009, 17:21, said:

are such reserved memory exist on i9x0 Omnia?

As far as I know the i9x0 does not have this problem, but the B7610 Omnia Pro does. I wonder if the B7300 does as well?

[johnchan]

Breit, on Dec 1 2009, 01:34, said:

it is a bit offtopic as well, but i just want to clear this: windows32 is indeed capable of adressing and using the whole 4gb, it is that just all adresses have to fit in the virtual 32-bit adress-space, which includes all pci-devices and their specific space as well in a pc. this includes the adressable graphics ram for instance and all the option roms for pci-controller/network controller etc, which are mapped into the 4gb adress space. there are techniques to circumvent this, but mainly for compatibility reasons this is often not used (e.g. pci 64bit adressing in a 32bit system).

so btt: i highly doubt that wm6.5 is not capable of using the whole 256mb (arm-11 is a 32bit cpu so 4gb should be adressable). maybe samsung is reserving so much ram for some kind of caching mechanism accessable only from inside the kernel. it seems that we have to wait for some custom cooked roms to make use of it.

can someone please check what other/similiar wm6.5 devices have to say about reserved memory? how is htc (e.g. with leo) handling this?

Other devices simply have the apps of the phone running in regular memory. In Samsung's case, the "reserved memory" is COMPLETELY unusable and inaccessible to Windows Mobile OS itself. That is, Windows Mobile cannot even SEE this RAM that Samsung "reserved". Doing more checking, this means it is NOT the WinMo cache or filesystem cache or anything like that.

This appears to be memory that is actually divided off from normal operational memory BEFORE Windows Mobile OS is actually loaded!!! So that means WinMo/apps/us have no ability to control this whatsoever.

Considering this, I highly doubt it is memory that has any use by WinMo or any Samsung WinMo applications, since it is being controlled outside of the OS itself.

[damienloh]

This situation is not unique to WM6.5. My Omnia II is using WM6.1 ROM IH3 (previously IG1).

If I remove all the shortcuts at the startup folder, the free RAM is about 80MB (Touchwiz disabled).
With the startup programs, the free RAM is about 60MB.

I notice some strange behaviour on the RAM usage, for example after surfing a few pages of full website,
the free RAM will drop to like 20+MB but Memmaid show that Opera Mobile 9.5 only take up about 5MB of RAM.
It seems that a lot of memory used for something else. Resource paging?
When Opera Mobile close, the free RAM restore to about 50MB.

Edited by damienloh, 01 December 2009 - 01:25 AM.

[dothan]

johnchan, on Dec 1 2009, 09:06, said:

Other devices simply have the apps of the phone running in regular memory. In Samsung's case, the "reserved memory" is COMPLETELY unusable and inaccessible to Windows Mobile OS itself. That is, Windows Mobile cannot even SEE this RAM that Samsung "reserved". Doing more checking, this means it is NOT the WinMo cache or filesystem cache or anything like that.

This appears to be memory that is actually divided off from normal operational memory BEFORE Windows Mobile OS is actually loaded!!! So that means WinMo/apps/us have no ability to control this whatsoever.

Considering this, I highly doubt it is memory that has any use by WinMo or any Samsung WinMo applications, since it is being controlled outside of the OS itself.

You are totally right, the reserved memory is totally not visible to WinMo 6.1 or 6.5. Therefore, we have reported actual memory is 140MB. In fact, Samsung plays a trick to fool us total RAM is 256MB on the Setting->Memory Setting->Program RAM! The worst thing is, Samsung applications uses the remaining 140MB after bootup. Something is fishy here...

In my past experience with HP Ipaq 1910 (the very first slimmest Ipaq released), partial of Pocket PC 2002 (prior to WinMo) have to transferred to RAM during bootup due to the NAND flash rom. Files located in NAND flash rom are not executable directly, they got to transfer to RAM first. So after the Ipaq booted up, you get lesser visible RAM to Pocket PC 2002.

The reason why use NAND flash rom?? Cost is the main reason!

This is my wild guess on why we have more than 100MB pre-occupied and not visible to WinMo at all. I think we need Samsung to explain on this issue clearly.

[guy.user]

Tarqon, on Nov 30 2009, 20:38, said:

As far as I know the i9x0 does not have this problem, but the B7610 Omnia Pro does. I wonder if the B7300 does as well?

I believe part of the ram is reserved on my i900 as well....

[guy.user]

wurzelsepp, on Nov 30 2009, 18:05, said:

Can't be the cube, on my omnia pro the same amount of ram is reserved,

I cant imagine that the reserved 120mb are useful for anything, what was Samsung thinking when doing this ???

I mean samsung makes the best hardware (AMOLED, and so on) 
but in terms of software they should invest more because the best hardware is nothing without good software.

Exactly...if we can combine Samsung's hardware & HTC's software, it will almost make a perfect device....

[nap_rz]

something is really fishy here

we need to get attention from samsung and reviewers..... anyone can help us by contacting reviewers like gsmarena or such? because most if not all reviews I've seen about this phone as well as it's brothers (omnia pro/lite/whatever) never mentioned this problems, they were satisfied with the performance; yet as we together experienced, this is serious problems that practically nullified one of the major point why we bought this phone.

[ray1234]

dothan, on Dec 1 2009, 09:26, said:

In my past experience with HP Ipaq 1910 (the very first slimmest Ipaq released), partial of Pocket PC 2002 (prior to WinMo) have to transferred to RAM during bootup due to the NAND flash rom. Files located in NAND flash rom are not executable directly, they got to transfer to RAM first. So after the Ipaq booted up, you get lesser visible RAM to Pocket PC 2002.

The reason why use NAND flash rom?? Cost is the main reason!

This is my wild guess on why we have more than 100MB pre-occupied and not visible to WinMo at all. I think we need Samsung to explain on this issue clearly.

You cannot compare PPC2002 against WM6.1/6.5, they are 2 different systems. In the days of PPC2002,  ROM is just used to store things only (those are not EPROM anyway, so cannot even re-flash), programs cannot execute in ROM, that's why on cold booting the stuff in ROM is still transferred back to RAM. It's only starting from WM5 that ROM is used to run programs.

The reserved rom doesn't mean it can't be used by the system, pagepool is a good example. Pagepool reserves the ram which is outside the 'seen' 140MB but the pagepool is in fact used by WM system for cache. My guess is a lot of the reserve ram goes to speed up the Touchwiz and Cube interface, which is completely useless to us who don't use the Touchwiz/Cube interface. I'm waiting for someone to cook a rom without the Touchwiz and Cube.

[dothan]

ray1234, on Dec 1 2009, 10:59, said:

You cannot compare PPC2002 against WM6.1/6.5, they are 2 different systems. In the days of PPC2002,  ROM is just used to store things only (those are not EPROM anyway, so cannot even re-flash), programs cannot execute in ROM, that's why on cold booting the stuff in ROM is still transferred back to RAM. It's only starting from WM5 that ROM is used to run programs.

The reserved rom doesn't mean it can't be used by the system, pagepool is a good example. Pagepool reserves the ram which is outside the 'seen' 140MB but the pagepool is in fact used by WM system for cache. My guess is a lot of the reserve ram goes to speed up the Touchwiz and Cube interface, which is completely useless to us who don't use the Touchwiz/Cube interface. I'm waiting for someone to cook a rom without the Touchwiz and Cube.

Well, I am not comparing PPC2002 against WinMo. In fact, many high end PPC2002 models come with NAND flash where you are allowed to execute directly on it. And NOR flash is not EEPROM and can be flashed with upgrade ROMs. You can see the are linux ROMs for flashing 1910 on handhelds.org.

I had gone through WinMo team blog and found this...  http://blogs.msdn.co.../17/494177.aspx

I think ROM cooker should remove the Touch Wiz and reduce the pagepool significantly. This phone is still a good WM phone as the processor is speedy.

Edited by dothan, 01 December 2009 - 03:26 AM.

[arun gupta]

nap_rz, on Dec 1 2009, 02:36, said:

something is really fishy here

we need to get attention from samsung and reviewers..... anyone can help us by contacting reviewers like gsmarena or such? because most if not all reviews I've seen about this phone as well as it's brothers (omnia pro/lite/whatever) never mentioned this problems, they were satisfied with the performance; yet as we together experienced, this is serious problems that practically nullified one of the major point why we bought this phone.

yes brother.. we needed to be told of this proble.. i think the reviewers website have samsung as their sponsers so probably thy cannot say negative.
now our money is at stake, and our fellow programmers can help us by giving a clean rom, with a better memory management..
;-)

[nap_rz]

one more thing

touchwiz is very heavy so I can't believe if it is actually received benefit from the reserved RAM

the cube on the other hand seem so fluid, yet I also can't believe such simple 3D interface need or actually received benefit from 100MB of RAM......the size of the cube is probably only 400x400x400 or something which should not need 100MB of memory.

and still no word from samsung...

is there actually someone out there who building clean ROM for O2 now?

[dothan]

Another thing we have to bear in mind is the double buffering technique for smooth divx playback...
Do you know the ScreenCapture.exe running as a process in our O2? Once you terminate it, your task switcher no longer able to display the correct app screenshot. To me, it's a waste of resource, I get rid with it and replace with standard task manager. Who wants a fancy task switcher which does not perform like Aero in Vista/Win7?