Benjamin Scott <dragonh...@gmail.com> writes: > On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Thomas Charron <twaf...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Hardware-Ben > > > > > > Am I right in that this thing cannot run an X server? > > > > It presents a framebuffer, so I see no reason why it couldn't > > except for RAM. > > I mean as in, "you won't find a working X server", not "sure it can, > just write one yourself". :) > > RAM may or may not be a problem. It's got 32 MB, which is more > than anything Project Athena had at first, but software seems to take > up more and more memory as times goes on. Maybe swapping to flash?
Maybe. Swapping to flash is often a more realistic option than people expect-- partly because modern flash-disks (with onboard controllers performing wear-levelling) are *way* more resilient than people expect, and partly because the way that swap ends up being used is vastly different from what people expect--most notably, if there are parts of a program's in-memory image that are rarely (or never) used, then those parts can get swapped-out (once) to make room in RAM for disk-buffer/-cache, and then may never be touched again. Of course, it all depends on the program--if Xorg and whatever client applications you want to run actually, *actively* use all of the memory that they allocate all the time, then maybe `swap to flash' (or even `swap' at all) isn't such a great option. One interesting thing to note, though, is that `active' doesn't just mean `the program is running'; even if something is running, if you're not interacting with it, and it's not doing something of its own accord, then there's a good chance that the entire process can safely be swapped out and then not touched until you switch back to it. It looks like a fresh instance of Xorg occupies ~14 MB of RAM on my laptop. Hmm.... -- "Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))." _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
