[saagarjha]

If you've been on the internet for a while, you've probably heard that iOS devices have far less memory than their Android counterparts. The main reason this works without problems is that the OS team is very, very conservative with letting people use memory. That this works is a testament to iOS's strategy of scaling up from the bottom rather than just throwing resources at a technical problem.

[Roark66]

Fun anecdote. I'm in a middle of writing an ML app for android that uses ncnn on top of Vulkan. In that app I need to decide how big chunks of work the model will handle at a time. When ncnn on Vulkan is asked for memory available, on a desktop platform it dutifully let's you know how much vram your GPU has. On android the answer always seems to be 3.5GB. 3.5GB of VRAM on a smartphone? No way. Perhaps it is a quirk of all the hw I tested on so far or a bug. In fact the hardware GPU shares system memory, but I highly doubt I could actually use 3.5GB.

[saagarjha]

Considering this is Android, perhaps you can find the code responsible for returning this value?

[Roark66]

Yes, I did. Unfortunately it appears to just return a hardcoded number on Android. So I can't do much with this without knowing some vulkan API I could use. Perhaps if this becomes a real issue I'll spend more time on it and I'll find one.

The ml framework I use (ncnn) uses vulkan beneath.

[pjmlp]

True, however and without wanting to steel this thread, there is one good thing about Google's strategy, it shows a glimpse of how Longhorn could have been like as managed OS, if the teams actually worked together instead of WinDev defending their feud and redoing the whole stuff in COM, and now we are stuck with it.

So in some sense, it is the kind of strategy that is required when needed to prove a point instead of trying to convince others just with words, which is always a big pain point when trying to talk about better approaches to secure software development.