Been thinking about this, and it maybe a stupid question

But I have tired Meego a couple of times with the more recent builds on a class 6 sd card and it is so painfully slow to use more than about 15 minutes to just see if it works

Now I know its only a developer release but this is my question

If it is so slow running on the N900 how can developers work on it the way they do

I know (or rather am guessing) that a lot of the development is done in a virtual machine so the speed side shouldnt be an issue

But at some point the image will have to go onto the hardware to make sure it actually does work on the hardware itself

So, how can you work on something that runs so slow

Or are things so different on the dev side of things ?

reflash meego to fast rootfs partition?

Virtual machine (qemu) was much slower than actual N900 last time I tried it. Maybe I need more power...

Is it that much faster natively on the N900 than on the sd card ?

Yes. Ridiculously. (I don't know the actual numbers. I just read this enough around here to be pretty confident in my answer.)

The chip that stores the swap partition is really fast (EDIT: Read post below this one. I need some schooling in my N900 partition knowledge). The chip that stores the rest of the stuff is a bit slower, but still pretty damn fast. The eMMC chip (the one where MyDocs sits) is slower still, but still, as I understand it, faster than the SD cards.

swap, home and MyDocs are on the same eMMC...
check with df -h in the console!

Swap's on eMMC? I could have sworn I read that SWAP used the little bit of flash chp inside the OMAP $SoC?

Oh well, fair enough.

But the point over-all still stands. I know there's at least three different chip thingies - the one inside the SoC itself, the one where the /opt stuff is stored, and the eMMC. Now, I honestly don't know beyond that how that's distributed. I thought it was the way above. If you'd like to help me figure it out further, by all means do. (If you're certain I'm wrong though, I'm more than happy to listen to corrections.)

My N900's df -h output (I have usef the df command plenty of times before, I just never noticed what you pointed out, I guess - though in my defense nothing says "swap" - there's a few "tmpfs" filesystems, one of which is exactly 1.0M, which makes me suspect that's the entire virtual memory...), shows a bunch of different things, of which none is clearly swap. And what do you know? The partition thing only tells you some info about what each file system is mounted on - which doesn't actually tell you anything about what chip what stuff is on.

As far as I know, there's 2 chips. The one in the SoC, which holds most of the root partition, and the eMMC, which holds /home, MyDocs, and swap.

If you do a
... you can see that the 700+MB of swap is at /dev/mmcblk0p3. From the df earlier, you can see that:

* /home/opt = /opt
* /dev/mmcblk0p2 = /home
* /dev/mmcblk0p1 = /home/user/MyDocs

Thus, /home (=/opt), swap, and MyDocs all are on the same chip.

tmpfs is just a fancy way of saying "use memory as a filesystem".

-jkq

Nitpick: the one that holds the rootfs is in the package on top of the SoC, along with the RAM. What you said about the eMMC is correct.