<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(26, 26, 26, 0.296875); -webkit-composition-fill-color: rgba(175, 192, 227, 0.230469); -webkit-composition-frame-color: rgba(77, 128, 180, 0.230469); ">On 23 Nov 2009, at 15:29, Brian Wood <<a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a>> wrote:</span><br></div></div><div><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>On Monday 23 November 2009 08:08:32 Richard Morton wrote:</span><br><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(148, 0, 14);"><br></span><span>The best solution is to not have a swap file or partition on a flash device at </span><br><span>all. Depending on how much RAM you have, and what you are doing, you may be </span><br><span>able to get along without any swap at all. That's what I am doing with my </span><br><span>flash-based Debian system.</span><br><span></span><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I would argue that for an FE you should only tun things for playback implying that they should not be swapped out.</div><div><br></div><div>However I see no technical reason why you could npt have swap on flash, and with it's low seek tume flash is actually quite suited to it. Windows ready boost is using it in this way (ie extending VM). </div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>I'm not sure what the noatime parameter would do with a swap partition, it's </span><br><span>intended to eliminate writing the access time each time a file is accessed on </span><br><span>a normal file system, but swap is not handled as a normal filesystem.</span><br><span></span><br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Noatime will do nothing for swap.</div><div><br></div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>If it's not causing any problems it certainly couldn't hurt, but I would try </span><br><span>to get swap off a flash device, either by eliminating it entirely if you can, </span><br><span>or writing it to a standard HDD partition, or even use an NFS-mounted file.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Swap can be enabled on either a partition or a file, as you probably know.</span><br><span></span><br><span>Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how the kernel handles swap </span><br><span>will have better suggestions?</span><br><span></span><br><span>--</span></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>You can trun down swappyness or run with none at all as long as you have enough memory to run all the bits you need. Otherwise when the kernel gets desperate it will run an OOM killer that usually zaps something important. Memory is pretty cheap.</div><div><br></div><div>Netbooting is usually easy to configure and update. Once running in a ram disk things are usually pretty fast. You then avoid any USB storage issues and the CPU overhead of USB storage (Scsi emulation etc...)</div><div><br></div><div>Having said that if you are not going to run nfs and or this is for a backend flash can be ok as long as you get a reliable stick. If anyone has any recomendations bar the patriot xts pls share!</div><div><br></div><div>Greg</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div><span> </span><br><span>Brian Wood</span><br><span><a href="mailto:beww@beww.org">beww@beww.org</a></span><br><span>_______________________________________________</span><br><span>mythtv-users mailing list</span><br><span><a href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">mythtv-users@mythtv.org</a></span><br><span><a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-">http://mythtv.org/cgi-</a></span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>