NAND out of space crash (was Display warnings in sugar (Emiliano Pastorino))

[Erik Garrison]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:47:21AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Emiliano has an elegant workaround but crashing the XO on NAND full (to 
> un-recoverable state?) is a heinous bug that affects essentially all users.
> 
> If someone has the bug ID handy can you send it out and mark it a 
> blocker for 8.2.0 (priority = blocker and keyword includes blocks:8.2.0)?
> 
> Can I get a design proposal (no re-partitioning please!), scoping and 
> lead engineer on it ASAP?
> 
> If you have to stop working on something else to do this, let me know 
> what will drop and I'll help weigh the consequences.

My impression is that the long-term benefits of partitioning mean that
it's worthwhile to devote effort to it.  Are we not going to work on
partitioning in the future?

In addition to a more solid solution to the NAND fillup issue, we get
the opportunity to improve system performance and upgrade procedures.
Partitioning will allow us to test out LZO data compression for the XO's
filesystems (excluding /boot and /security).  We would expect a
significant i/o performance boost from the use of LZO.  Additionally,
partitioning would improve OFW-level system updates (e.g. copy-nand) by
making it far simpler for the update procedure to leave user data
intact.

That said there are obviously a lot of troubles with partitioning.
Updating an existing system to a partitioned one without mashing user
data is a major issue.

Erik