[vtk-developers] OS level services

[Volpe, Christopher R (CRD)]

I was thinking of adding a little to our list of classes that perform OS-specific services (currently
things like MutexLock, CriticalSection, MultiThreader, etc) to do some additional useful things. For
example, in an application we're working on, we improve performance by increasing the working set
size of the process and locking certain large data structures in physical RAM to avoid paging. It
occurs to me that this should be encapsulated so that code which wants to take advantage of it can do
so in a system-independent manner. Now, dropping a class in the list which does this stuff would be
uninvasive and little cause for concern, but it occurs to me that a better thing to do, perhaps,
would be to augment the functionality of the various vtk data structures so that they can perform
these operations on their internal representations. For example, it would be nice to be able to say
to an instance of vtkImageData, or vtkPolyData, "mydata->LockPhysical()",  and have all the
subclasses and internal ivars handle it appropriately through class method invocations on a class
that provides these services. Does this make sense? Would this be useful?


Chris
> g GE Corporate Research & Development 
> ___________________________________________________________________________________________________
> _______________________________________________
> 
Christopher R. Volpe
Computer Scientist
Visualization and Computer Vision Program / Electronic Systems Lab
Bldg KW, Room C215
P.O. Box 8, Schenectady, NY 12301

(518) 387-7766, Dial Comm: 8*833-7766, Fax: (518) 387-6981
e-mail: volpecr at crd.ge.com    web: http://www.crd.ge.com/~volpecr