Ideas wanted: What should I do with 63 MiB?
 

I've tried searching the forum but to my surprise did not find anyone mentioning it. In the process of expanding my optfs partition, I found that that there was an extra unused space beyond the last (swap) partition. 63 MiB to be precise. Moving the swap seems like a lot of hassle so I just created a fourth partition to claim that space. But now I am not sure how to use it. Ideas I have considered so far:

1. Extend the swap partition. I don't think I really need it. I have never hit a situation when I would fill the 768 MiB I already have. Plus experience shows that switching swap off even temporarily is asking for trouble. So I would have to do it by connecting to a PC which kinda breaks my preferred way of doing everything on-device.

2. Move swap 63 MiB up and extent optfs accordingly (or even move both swap and optfs and extend MyDocs). Same drawbacks as above.

3. Use it for something like /var. Trouble is, my /var takes only about 1.3 MiB. Seems like a waste to reserve 63 MiB for it.

4. Link/mount a random directory there. But which one? I do not want to suddenly run out of space or have to change my setup every time I install or uninstall an application. Another disadvantage is that it won't be backed up by BackupMenu. So it should ideally be something more-or-less static.

5. Any other ideas?

Re: Ideas wanted: What should I do with 63 MiB?
 

More-or-less static.. lemme think. Yup, put /boot and /lib/modules (stock and kp52 make ~12MB combined) in there. That is, if you have the cojones for it :) and manage to tweak Maemo and U-Boot/Bootmenu as required so that it actually works.

Or make a mini-recovery-linux so that if you fvck up your rootfs and neither USB nor microSD work (for some reason) you can always use U-boot to boot from that partition. Manage that, and you'll have the eternal gratitude of, well, me.

Re: Ideas wanted: What should I do with 63 MiB?
 

With great sadness I have to announce that two things are no more. My 63 MB partition and my record of never using the PC to tweak my phone. I had a bad file system corruption and needed a mass storage in backupmenu to sort it out. Whilst at it, I proceeded with option 2 above. So there :(

Re: Ideas wanted: What should I do with 63 MiB?
 

Hey, if backupmenu worked, you could have used it's recovery console to fix it without connecting to another machine ;)

For the thing itself - the fastest solution is to enable swap on sd for a moment, delete eMMC swap partition, then re-create it at the end - mentioned 63 MB will end up *before* swap, so yoiu can quickly resize mmcblk0p2 to contain it. Or do so from early shell (backupmenu's one, or recovery shell, or...), when you don't need swap at all (nor have one mounted, so you can mess with it's partition without worry about disabling swap).

/Estel

Re: Ideas wanted: What should I do with 63 MiB?
 

Well, backupmenu worked and I had started off with the recovery console, but the moment fsck said, "system FUBAR, try -b 8193", I gave up, connected it to a PC and made a dd snapshot of the home partition to look at it offline.