F9 for Eeepc

[John (J5) Palmieri]

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.
  
-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>