OESF Portables Forum

General Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: cmisip on April 07, 2004, 09:03:54 pm

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: cmisip on April 07, 2004, 09:03:54 pm

Wish the zaurus 5600 had more memory.  I know that it is possible to create ram disks in linux.  My desktop systems have memory to spare and the zaurus can connect via 802.11b.  I dont know if it is possible to nfs export a virtual ram drive though.  If it is possible,  and a swap device can be created for the zaurus this way, then the I/O should be faster but I dont know it the 802.11b will be a bottleneck.  At any rate, it might extend the life of my SD card.   Has anybody tried this?

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: kbranch on April 07, 2004, 10:44:15 pm

Unless I\'m horribly, horribly mistaken, there\'s no way that the storage on the desktop end would be the bottleneck.  WiFi is only 10 Mbps, which is about 1.25 MBps.  I don\'t know about yours, but my hard drive can transfer at about 8 MBps.  Also, in my experience the Zaurus can\'t come close to getting the full speed of WiFi.

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: mussi on April 08, 2004, 05:59:36 pm

I wouldn\'t try it. For various reasons like timouts, data corruption etc, etc.

Rather repartition your Z, 48 MB RAM and 16 for / works quite nicely.

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: cmisip on April 08, 2004, 11:09:54 pm

The zaurus 5600 can be repartitioned?  Please share how.

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: ran on April 09, 2004, 03:58:24 am

Quote

I dont know if it is possible to nfs export a virtual ram drive though.

Probably:  it has to sit someplace in the filesystem hierarchy on the PC,  so it should be possible to export its mount point.

I know at least one Webpal hacker did swapping via NFS over 10BaseT Ethernet.  He had to do a kernel patch on the Webpal,,  though (iirc).  A google search for \"webpal nfs swap\" should turn up a page describing it.

Ran

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: cmisip on April 18, 2004, 12:24:47 am

Thanks for the tip.  I found the webpal howto. and have gotten it to work.  So far it seems to be faster than SD card swapfile.  I dont know how to benchmark though.  I created a 20 meg ramdisk on my linux server, nfs exported it to the zaurus and used it as a swapfile.

I am wondering how high I can push this.   Are the memory problems on the Z a thing of the past?

Will keep testing

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: ScottYelich on April 18, 2004, 09:44:10 am

yes, of course you can do this.
I\'ve run with diskless systems in the past -- but they were all hardwired.
with wifi, I\'d think that you\'d be really asking for trouble -- swap is
important.  I\'d recommend to just buy a (largeR) CF.  They\'re cheap.

Scott

Title: Is this possible or practical? mount an nfs ram disk as swap
Post by: cmisip on April 21, 2004, 09:12:22 pm

I only need it for Opera which always complains of being out of memory.  It seems to be working fine now.