3.5.4 Rc Oz/gpe Disk Layout And Memory Limits

[chasetec]

My goal with my Collie(5500) is to surf the web and check email. I just got a bluetooth phone(w/ data service) but the screen is too small for browsing more then a couple of minutes so I figured my Zaurus would be perfect to pair with my phone. Opie doesn't work for me because I want a stable(not Opera) web browser that supports proxy servers(konqueror doesn't).

I need bluetooth(have a Belkin CF F8T020) and Opie required alot more editing of files to make it work, with GPE is was easy to get the Bluetooth card working. However it's a lot easier to figure out how to make a dialup connection in Opie. What dialer is everyone else using for GPE?

I also have a Sandisk Connect Plus(for 802.11b CF) that I'll use sometimes instead of my Bluetooth adapter. It's nice to just have to add hostap-utils, prism3-firmware, and prism3-support and have the card working.

I installed 64-0 OZ 3.5.4 RC/GPE (several times now). I should also mention that I have a 1BG SD card for files and packages. I saw another posting in this forum that said the swap root trick(http://openzaurus.org/wordpress/howto/root-on-sd/) shouldn't be used because you can just do ipkg -d sd install somepackage followed by ipkg-link add somepackage. So I install the stuff for my wireless card to sd and then fix/add in the feeds so I can install dillo2,minimo, and gpe-mini-browser.

Installing just about anything from http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/sfeed/ causes my collie to crash with out of space errors(installing to sd card). The only work around I've found is to follow the root on sd guide. Is this what everybody else is seeing?

Once I get everything installed with no errors the various browsers will crash from being out of memory(using 64-0 image already). The only thing I can do to keep this from happening that often is to create a swap file on the SD card. Monitoring memory/swap with top and free I've seen all 64MB of memory get used and up to 32MB of swap, just running a single web browser here.

I'm about to install again because I made my root image take up the whole SD card so I had to make my swap file inside of my root image. I'm sure I'll get better performance once I fix that because I can see the loopback device get high on CPU utilization when swap gets used right now.

Is everybody else having to do the same thing? Is the collie(5500) just to old for (working)web browsing?

[lardman]

Installing just about anything from http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/sfeed/ causes my collie to crash with out of space errors(installing to sd card).

Are you sure the SD card is mounted? If it's not, then /media/card will still be on the root partition.

What does 'df' (and 'mount') show once you run out of memory?

Once I get everything installed with no errors the various browsers will crash from being out of memory(using 64-0 image already). The only thing I can do to keep this from happening that often is to create a swap file on the SD card. Monitoring memory/swap with top and free I've seen all 64MB of memory get used and up to 32MB of swap, just running a single web browser here.

That's odd, but possible I suppose - what kind of sites cause these memory outages? What does 'cat /proc/meminfo' show (I want to check that the whole 64MB of memory is being used, that you haven't got a misnamed kernel, etc.)?


Si

[chasetec]

Installing just about anything from http://ewi546.ewi.utwente.nl/sfeed/ causes my collie to crash with out of space errors(installing to sd card).

Are you sure the SD card is mounted? If it's not, then /media/card will still be on the root partition.

What does 'df' (and 'mount') show once you run out of memory?

Watching things a little bit closer I noticed just the "ipkg install gpe-mini-browser" taking up 16M RSS.

I'm sure it's mounted, it had something like 983 megs free and mount shows it mounted under /media/card.

I can't do a df because after ipkg displaying a bunch of "no space left of device" errors my Z freezes and usually won't boot after.

Once I get everything installed with no errors the various browsers will crash from being out of memory(using 64-0 image already). The only thing I can do to keep this from happening that often is to create a swap file on the SD card. Monitoring memory/swap with top and free I've seen all 64MB of memory get used and up to 32MB of swap, just running a single web browser here.

That's odd, but possible I suppose - what kind of sites cause these memory outages? What does 'cat /proc/meminfo' show (I want to check that the whole 64MB of memory is being used, that you haven't got a misnamed kernel, etc.)?


Si
[div align=\"right\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Using gpe-mini-browser I'm going to [a href=\"http://www.digg.com]http://www.digg.com[/url].
top showed 42M RSS for gpe-mini-browser

Code: [Select]

root@collie:~# cat /proc/meminfo
       total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  63909888 62799872  1110016        0   167936 14983168
Swap: 104849408 13029376 91820032
MemTotal:        62412 kB
MemFree:          1084 kB
MemShared:           0 kB
Buffers:           164 kB
Cached:          12340 kB
SwapCached:       2292 kB
Active:              0 kB
Inactive:        54944 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:        62412 kB
LowFree:          1084 kB
SwapTotal:      102392 kB
SwapFree:        89668 kB

Code: [Select]

root@collie:~# free
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        62412        61084         1328            0          200
 Swap:       102392        14720        87672
Total:       164804        75804        89000

[lardman]

I'd ask about the gpe-minibrowser issue on #gpe (or on the gpe mailing list). It may be that it's not that good at memory footprint (it's fairly new), but I'm sure someone there will be able to help you out.

I can't do a df because after ipkg displaying a bunch of "no space left of device" errors my Z freezes and usually won't boot after.

During an install to somewhere other than root, no files should be written to the root directory other than the package status list (I think...?) - if there's insufficient space for this, then you might get out of space errors; otherwise I wonder if it might be an out of memory error misreported by ipkg when it fails?

Can't think of any other reason for the error I'm afraid. You could try rebooting and then look at the SD card and make sure the files were actually installed there...

Might also be worth checking that /var is actually mounted as a ramfs otherwise installing large packages will also fill up root (this is the reason it's mounted as a ramfs).


Si

[chasetec]

I'd ask about the gpe-minibrowser issue on #gpe (or on the gpe mailing list). It may be that it's not that good at memory footprint (it's fairly new), but I'm sure someone there will be able to help you out.

I can't do a df because after ipkg displaying a bunch of "no space left of device" errors my Z freezes and usually won't boot after.

During an install to somewhere other than root, no files should be written to the root directory other than the package status list (I think...?) - if there's insufficient space for this, then you might get out of space errors; otherwise I wonder if it might be an out of memory error misreported by ipkg when it fails?

Can't think of any other reason for the error I'm afraid. You could try rebooting and then look at the SD card and make sure the files were actually installed there...

Might also be worth checking that /var is actually mounted as a ramfs otherwise installing large packages will also fill up root (this is the reason it's mounted as a ramfs).


Si
[div align=\"right\"][a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=113241\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a][/div]

Any idea where do the ipk files get stored until they are installed? They have to get cached somewhere and I didn't see any of them on my sd. Is it somewhere under /var?

[lardman]

They should be downloaded to /tmp or /var (/tmp is a subdir of /var anyway iirc).

You can tell ipkg to be more verbose and it will tell you where it's downloading the files to (iirc)


Si