Fate wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Ole Carlsen <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi
>     Where would be the best place to put a swap file / partition? On the
>     mmc? I have tried to follow the instruction on
>     http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/SHR#opkg_upgrade_.22fork_failed.22 but I
>     keep getting a resource busy message, so I thought of making it
>     permanent and add it in fstab.
> 
>     If a swap file is a benefit why isn't it part of standard images then??
> 
> 
> it wears down the memory card, a lot of writes and reads...

Hopefully it will never be actually used.

Linux uses a "copy-on-write" technique to ensure that duplicate memory
doesn't actually get duplicated until one process changes it.  So the
swapfile satisfies the requirement that sufficient virtual memory is
available for the worst case; in fact opkg (like almost every app using
fork() in existence) does not ever cause the memory to be copied, as the
child process never actually modifies but a few pages of the memory
duplicated from the parent.

Adding a swapfile is a reasonable short-term workaround for the bad opkg
behavior.

Changing the Out-of-memory killer behavior is also an option, although
not good practice: use sysctl to set vm.overcommit_memory to "1" which
will allow the system to overcommit memory without limit.

These are just short-term workarounds, and won't fix opkg's bad behavior
in all cases, just in many cases.  To fix opkg for all situations will
require the patches I mentioned in an earlier email.

Mike (mwester)
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