F9 for Eeepc

[Orion Poplawski]

Jonathan Underwood wrote:
> On 25/01/2008, John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 15:39 -0700, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>>
>>> - Flash drive.  Want to minimize writes.  One attempt (eeedora) uses the
>>> ext2 filesystem rather than ext3.  Does that help?  Are there things to
>>> take from stateless projects for minimizing writes to /var?
>>>
>> jffs2 is what we use on the OLPC, there is another FS in the works that
>> is a lot better for large flash though.  I forget the name.  On modern
>> flash you don't have to worry about rewrites as much though since the
>> hardware randomizes writes.  What kills the disk on older flash drives
>> is writing to the journal in Ext3 and writing to the FAT on Fat disks.
>> Both of those are fixed locations which stress out a small portion of
>> the disk.  Each flash device has only so many writes per bit before that
>> bit dies.  By distributing it over the whole disk it takes a lot longer
>> to destroy.  I would check the specs on the flash drive that came with
>> the Eee.  Another thing you might want to do is not have a swap
>> partition.  Apps run fine without swap, you just might run into OOM more
>> frequently.
>>
> 
> The eeepc drive has a FTL, so these drives don't appear as flash
> drives to the OS, so jffs, yaffs, logfs and the like aren't applicable
> to the eeepc, as I understand it.

The drive appears as a standard IDE drive.  dmesg reports the drive as a 
"SILICONMOTION SM223AC".   Google doesn't seem to turn up much other 
than users' reports on their eeePC :-).


-- 
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA/CoRA Division                    FAX: 303-415-9702
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