[Server-devel] Root fs on XO1

[James Cameron]

On Fri, Aug 09, 2013 at 08:31:27AM -0500, 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).]

Yes, you have gone through the effort of finding 35 out of 40 cards
capable of operating well with the faulty hardware.  ;-)  That's
something that an XSCE deployer probably can't afford, especially if
the site is remote.

> 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.

I agree swap can be very useful.  I like swap over network block
device using USB ethernet.  The size of the swap can be unlimited (a
sparse file), additional swap spaces can be added as needed, there's
no worry about SD card compatibility, and no worry about endurance of
FLASH in the card or USB drive.  Sustainability.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Swap#Swap_to_network_block_device

-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.linux.org.au/