Here's a response from a co-worker who has done some work on his EEE pc:
Interesting stuff. As I understand it, with the Asus I've read that
they've basically leveraged a write-balancing algorithm at the flash
firmware level so that they fairly evenly distribute updates across
the flash. So, bottom line, Asus doesn't worry too much about burn-
in. They even ship with a writable ext3 partition, which would be
really detrimental to disk due to the "duplicate write" overhead of
continuous journaling (presumably in a fixed area of the disk?) if
it weren't for the balancing logic.
W.r.t. keeping log size down, I think Asus's build of Xandros has
turned off a bunch of debug-level logging within most of their
packages (at build time?) and as such doesn't really demand much
disk for logging operations, etc.
Same may apply to a Gentoo install - compile your stuff to not log
at debug level (or turn off in syslog?) and you should be fine...
One thing that I did observe when I started using external ext2/ext3
partitions on the SD card slot was extremely lethargic writes. This
was due to the fact that SD cards with ext2/ext3 partitions were
being mounted with the 'sync' flag. From what I have read, this is
extremely slow and extremely detrimental to flash. This is because
every byte would be written individually, but due to the way flash
works, you write a block at once. So, say the block size is 192
bytes... To write 192 bytes with sync on could cause 192 flashes of
the block (or some fraction/multiple of 192). With async enabled
(sync not enforced) the OS is able to cache up some data before
writing, dramatically increasing the likelihood that it will have
enough data to fill the block in 1 single write operation.
So, another tip for Gentoo users - make sure any ext2/ext3 flash
partitions are mounted async (default) - not with the sync flag set
like Xandros does by default with the SD card slot...
-Andrew
On Apr 17, 2008, at 11:12 AM, Christian Bricart wrote:
Joshua ChaitinPollak wrote:
[..]
I don't know how you'd handle things like Firefox's cache, I don't
know any way to reduce its writes or redirect them out of your
profile.
http://www.mozilla.org/catalog/end-user/customizing/briefprefs.html
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
drop a file in /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/defaults/pref/ with content
like:
+---
| pref("browser.cache.disk.parent_directory", "/tmp");
+---
or even:
+---
| pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
+---
Christian
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Joshua ChaitinPollak | Software Engineer
Kiva Systems, Inc., 225 Wildwood Ave, Woburn, MA 01970
