> What about using a NAND partition as swap? Has this ever been done? > Given that partition support is a recent development it seems unlikely.
Swapping to the soldered-in NAND chips is a very bad idea. It will tend to wear them out rapidly. Even if you use load-leveling software (e.g. swapping to a file in a jfffs2 filesystem), the problem is that if you do start wearing out serious numbers of flash blocks, the laptop becomes toast; it requires a soldering iron and spare chips to fix it. A much more reliable scheme would be to swap to an SD card, if one is plugged in and contains a swap partition (or a file in its root called SWAPFILE). See http://dev.laptop.org/ticket/8410. Even a small, cheap SD card could double or triple the available virtual RAM space. And if an SD card gets worn out, you merely pull it out of the laptop, throw it away, and buy a new one (for a fraction of the original cost, since Moore's Law has been working in your favor in the intervening years). This doesn't solve the least-common-denominator problem of people without SD cards -- but it does offer a user, or a deployment, a very simple and relatively cheap way to solve most problems related to physical RAM size. On the topic of memory overload in general: Older XO releases did much better things when they ran out of physical memory: they tended to rapidly kill off some process, leaving the system largely functional. In 767, the system instead goes from usable to molasses-like in a period of seconds, then freezes totally for minutes or hours. As far as I know, nobody has debugged why that changed. The prior behavior was infinitely preferable. John _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
