OLPC upgrades

[david at lang.hm]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 1:03 PM,  <david at lang.hm> wrote:
>> Ok, what tools can I use to satisfy you of this 'opinion' that
>> applications start faster on either KDE or GNOME than on Sugar on the same
>> hardware.
>>
>> by the way, you are the first person I have heard dispute this.
>
> Erik has done a few things lately that made me change perspective.
> Most comparisons have been made against stuff running off the SD-card,
> and made our Sugar/Fedora look very slow in comparison. Everyone
> jumped on Python/Sugar.
>
> However, our NAND is *slow*, it busy-waits, JFFS2 is slow, and Linux
> under a bit of mem pressure (and having no swap) starts discarding
> pages, assuming that disk reads are reasonably fast and
> non-cpu-blocking. But reading pages from the NAND turns out to be slow
> and most importantly it pegs the CPU hard.
>
> Get the debxo or the vanilla fedoras running on the NAND. The
> performance delta is not what we thought it would be.

I know that debxo will install on the NAND. I haven't done so on my 
systems yet as I wanted to leave the NAND intact to test the official 
builds. I'll go ahead and do this on one of my boxes.

most of my testing has been via USB, do you have any idea how it compares 
performance wise to the NAND and SD card?

is there any ability to not use JFFS2 on the NAND?

David Lang