[Server-devel] Root fs on XO1

[John Watlington]

Just to clarify a comment that James made:

On XO-1, the qualification of the SD card interface was done by Quanta.
They seemed to think it worked fine.   When I started doing extensive
testing of SD cards in preparation for using them in XO-1.5, I discovered
that some XO-1s did not have a reliable SD card interface.    Bit error
rates aren't high (maybe an error every few days when continuously
exercising the card), but unacceptable from my point of view.

So as James said, it might work for you, but not work so well on an
arbitrary XO-1.

On later XO models, I personally tested the SD interface(s) with a
wide variety of SD cards to avoid repeating the same mistake.

Regards,
wad


On Aug 9, 2013, at 9:31 AM, Mikus Grinbergs wrote:

> On 08/09/2013 06:17 AM, James Cameron wrote:
>> I have never been happy with using the
>> XO-1 SD card slot.
> 
> I have been using SD cards in the XO-1 SD card slot for more than five years now.  Although I have experienced occasions of SD card corruption, they have been so rare as to not affect what I've been doing with my XO-1 systems (I just "clean" the SD card and keep on using it).  In those five years I have had maybe five SD card failures (the SD card stops responding electrically) out of a pool of about 40 cards -- I consider my SD cards to have provided me "acceptable reliability". [Contrast that with my experience with XO-1.5 systems - four out of ten failed (admittedly, the failures were early systems).]
> 
> By providing a swap partition on the SD card, I've been able to run *large* Linux applications (e.g., BOINC, gvSIG) on the XO-1, despite its limited main memory (I run them from Terminal in the Sugar environment, and live with the limited multi-window capability provided by Sugar). What I place on the SD card is executables (e.g., Adobe, Java, Browsers, Sugar Activities (3GB+), Timidity) and data (mainly accessed through Terminal - Movies, Books, Music, Images, Maps, etc.).
> 
> Without my 'permanent' SD card. the XO-1 would be "too little" for me.
> 
> mikus
> 
> 
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