Small Home Partitions + Large IPKs

[iamasmith]

It seems that the temporary download location on Kathrin RC5 is something like /home/tmp/ipks which is actually a directory on your home partition rather than a link to /tmp or any of the other tmpfs links.

Last try I had with RC5 I made the root partition 116 Mb, leaving 12Mb for PIM stuff, I thought that would be fine.

Unfortunately by the time I got to install the quake IPK there wasn't enough room in /home to download it.

Is there a practical reason why this location is here rather than tmpfs ?, if so I would suggest a note on partition sizing.

I got round it by linking /home/tmp/ipkg to /tmp temporarily.

- Andy

[offroadgeek]

I know this doesn't answer your question directly, but the partition doesn't actually have the full 128mb available, about 7mb is used for system stuff (nand, etc.) that can't be changed.  So the max partition size is 121mb (which the installer mentions), so you only had 5mb available.

I just make my root partition the full 121mb and keep all my pim data, and other stuff on my SD card.  That way nothing gets lost (unless I lose my card), and quake installs just fine

[iamasmith]

Ah, this makes a lot of sense.

Thanks offroadgeek

[lardman]

I ran into this problem a while back. Perhaps someone should submit a bug report to have a RAM based tmpfs available for this kind of thing - it's a far cleaner method IMO.


Si

[rgrep]

The problem with unpacking to a RAM-based FS is that what happens when you run out of RAM?  The current /tmp is limited to 12 MB (as defined in /etc/rc.d/rc.rofilesys) and could be increased, but with matchbox and a single aterm running my C760 only has a total of 27 MB free RAM.

Some IPKs can be quite large and this is compounded when you're storing the packed and unpacked versions during the install.  Without a swap file you're a bit stuffed when you begin running out of RAM - processes will be killed and this could play havoc in the middle of an ipkg install.

While I'm not a fan of using my internal flash for temporary storage, I would rather that than have to worry about closing all my applications before installing new software.  If it causes a problem for you then you can always symlink /home/tmp to somewhere with lots of free space (such as an SD card).

Just my $0.02.

[iamasmith]

rgrep,

Yep, that sounds quite sensible, I think it's just something that may want to get added to 'release notes'.

I like offroadgeeks solution so I'm going to use that myself.

- Andy

[lardman]

The problem with unpacking to a RAM-based FS is that what happens when you run out of RAM?

Presumably exactly the same thing that happens when you run out of space on /home :-), except that you're not wearing the flashROM and you don't then preclude any further operations.

but with matchbox and a single aterm running my C760 only has a total of 27 MB free RAM.

I presume you've included cached memory in this total?

On my Z (OZ+Opie), I have 15.5Mb of used memory (excluding cache which isn't used per se). I'm surprised that pdaXrom takes up so much memory even 'at rest'. It must presumably make running anything pretty difficult.

I wonder if this is actually a problem with your version of ipkg. Why does it have to extract all of the files before it copies them into place? It would be far easier to just extract them directly to their end locations. I'm not sure how the OZ ipkg handles this but it might be worth looking at.


Si

[iamasmith]

I ended up making the root fs 121Mb, removing the /home mount out of fstab - this creates /home on root.

I then made symlinks as follows to directories on the card...

/home/root/Documents -> /mnt/card/Documents
/home/root/kdepim -> /mnt/card/home/root/kdepim
/home/tmp -> /mnt/card/home/tmp

I left the bulk of the root home directory on so I could just use the automount feature in the startup scripts for the onboard dev image (as the SD card isn't mounted when this script runs) but using this the /home/tmp is now on my 512Mb SD card so no more worries about losing space - and I would rather 'wear' the SD card that the Z flash