Excuse me ahead of time - flames ahead... > It wasn't supposed to break anything; the implementation that shipped > on the T5 is a bit buggy, but palmOne and PalmSource are working on > improving it and making it work much better with new software.
Okay, I've been holding my tongue for a long time... Anyone could take one look at the PalmOS plan to "improve" things with this lame NVFS stuff and know there was going to be trouble. Right off the bat their marketing hype claimed improved reliability, performance and capacity. First of all, the old way provided immediate write to battery backed storage. You reset and you've lost nothing. The new way buffers all our nice important data in volatile storage. We can't flush it and we can't know when the OS has deigned to write it through to flash, so we never really know when the data is safe. Scratch reliability. Second, the performance sucks rocks for many of us who use the storage heap a lot. No problem for the simple little app that gets a record, the user plays with it for a while, then writes it back out. For those of us with lots of dynamic data, it's an unreliable pig. Third, I'll give PalmWhomever half credit - they sorta solved the ugly 512 byte sector fiasco. So just how many DECADES have the rest of us had blocking and deblocking figured out? How many file system failures did it take for the rest of the known world to settle on a few working paradigms? And somehow Palm couldn't maybe just look around a little and figure it out, too? So, all in all I wish PalmWhomever would stop yapping about all the advantages of this NVFS stuff, and just admit that it's a cheap way to build high capacity devices. We'll just have to suck it up and deal with the wild departure from the old way, the poor, indeterminant lack of reliabilty, and the lack of performance. We can handle that. > On the PluggedIn site, please look for a whitepaper called "NVFS White > Paper" in the Developer Resources section. It was last updated in March Forget the white paper. How about a big "my fault" paper, and then some plan for fixing it. Flame off. -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
