On Tue, 9 May 2006 10:15:20 -0700 Eugene Surovegin <ebs at ebshome.net> wrote:
> On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 05:41:01PM +0100, Alex Zeffertt wrote: > > On Tue, 09 May 2006 10:38:19 -0400 > > geneSmith <gd.smth at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > I have a ppc405gpr system with 64M ram and 4Meg flash in a > > > AM29LV320. Is this a viable platform for linux? Can a filesystem > > > (JFFS2?) be put this flash type? > > > > > > > I would create an initrd and put every file that doesn't need > > to be changed persistently into it instead of JFFS2. > > After many years of doing embedded Linux stuff I still don't > understand why people are so fond of initrd. > > For temporary stuff - tempfs is much better and flexible. For r/o > stuff - just make separate MTD partition (cramfs, squashfs) and > mount it directly as root. Both options will waste significantly > less memory. > Okay, let me qualify my answer. It depends on whether you need to make persistent changes to the filesystem in flash. If so, and given that your flash is only 4MB, I would recommend moving files to somewhere else, e.g. an initrd, because if when a JFFS2 FS is approaching full, you often find that writes to flash hang while JFFS2 searches for blocks to use as a scratchpad. This has been my experience anyway. If you don't need to make persistent changes to files, then I'm sure cramfs in flash as a rootfs would work well, with a tmpfs partition mounted on /tmp and /var. Alex
