The soldered in NAND is also 14 times slower on writes and half the speed of a good SD card.
wad On Dec 18, 2008, at 5:51 AM, John Gilmore wrote: >> 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 _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
