[desktop-discuss] Why alacarte doesn't work on solaris

[Darren Kenny]

Stefan,

It only works on Solaris through polling - it doesn't work from the point of
view of it supporting the notification from the kernel that something has changed.

On multi-user systems this "busy" idling (polling) is very expensive since each
process only has a tiny slice of the CPU in which to do something. For this
reason we don't support libfam in JDS - this doesn't mean you couldn't use it
yourself, but from the point of view of including alacarte into JDS this is an
issue.

There has been some work mentioned over on the perf-discuss forum, to being the
kernel only API (File Event Mechanism) into userland using the event ports
mechanism. Should this be done, we will have a way to make libfam or gamin work
on Solaris such that there isn't a need to poll for information. But it's not
clear what the time-line on this is at present - although I did send off an
e-mail to try find out...

Darren.

Stefan Teleman wrote:
> On 7/31/06, Harry Lu <Harry.Lu at sun.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>         Today I did some research on why alacarte (a gnome menu editor,
>> http://www.realistanew.com/projects/alacarte/) doesn't work on Solairs.
>> It turns out the root cause is Solaris doesn't support FAM.
> 
> FAM works on Solaris.
> 
> --Stefan
>