[Server-devel] Notes about XS on XO...

[Martin Langhoff]

Jerry prompted me to think about what's interesting to hack on around
running XS on the XO... these are somewhat rambling notes...

- memory management around
presence (ejabberd...) and the other memory hogs is a good idea. I did
some mem management tricks in the apache and pg config files (with
conditionals in the init script and config files) and that'll need
tuning. And extending to ejabberd and other memory hogs...

- I think a very interesting bit would be to see if the F9 with recent
stock F9 kernels (from updates) works out-of-the-box on the XO. I know
Jess Keating + jg did quite a bit of work to workaround some issues
with the initrd causing a lock up. The fixes sure went into the F10
initrd, but i don't know if they got backported to F9 initrd. There's
good discussion in the fedora-olpc list archive if things don't
boot...

- We'll prolly want to make sure we do something smart about power mgmt
too. I'm thinking...

 -- don't go to sleep on lid closed event
 -- most services will be on a usb disk (postgres, apache, etc) so
going to sleep with a wake-up process that delays usb bringup (which
is where the linux kernel is moving towards) means trouble -- we
probably should just never really go into deep sleep
 -- monitor power status - and if we are low on battery with no line
power, shutdown orderly... (treat the battery as you would a UPS...)

 - try to erradicate memory hogs
   -- dnsmasq could replace dhcpd+bind
   -- registration service could be run from xinitrd or just moved to
run under apache / mod_python

 - we need to think about what to do to for handling the /library
partition - need to think the workflow through for
  - initialisation
  - remounting on every boot - the right disk & partition
  - backup/mirror to a new disk
  - mirror-and-replace to a new disk

In the middle of all the mayhem, it's good to think about technical
challenges...

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff