I know the N900 has 256megs 768megs swap and 32gigs of storage.

Reading the reports im not clear if the swap is just a partition on the 32gig storage or a separate type of (hopefully) storage.

Whenever I setup a linux distro I much prefer to dynamically add the swap i need it by building a number of big empty file on / and formatting/mounting them as swap

It's a partition on the internal 32GB eMMC:

• 768MB of swap
• ~2GB of ext3
• Rest as FAT32

hey that's great..2GB for apps? i like that alot..now i will be able to install not only apps but games too

2b - Operating system

cheers, looks like i will be doing some repartitioning, i would normally be slightly worried about a large amount of writes to an ssd but you can get a full kde desktop under 256 apparently since the qt4 rewrite

Keeping the swap on the large memory card means less overall wear, as the writes will be spread across the whole card.

It's an eMMC, actually. But modern flash isn't really all that prone to write failure. Especially if you don't fill it up completely.

I'm not sure that's right. Modern flash is worse at cycling, and it's only getting worse as the lithography drops. Corwin was correct, spreading the writes across the whole card will significantly enhance the endurance, provided that it is actually done properly.

Seems to me that Corwin and GA are both right... the flash memory will wear level using free space, fill it up and wear levelling won't be so efficient (which is pretty much what GA is getting at). Mind you as long as the kernel implements TRIM the flash memory should be kept in good shape.

Free space (especially considering fragmentation and FAT) does influence it, but not directly. The eMMC works 2+ levels below the filesystem, it has no idea which parts does the FS consider 'empty' - but it doesn't have to know that to work ! Think about it this way - whether a block (from the FS aspect) is empty or not has nothing to with how many times it was overwritten in the past. It's better to move a newly written block to a long-time (FS wise) *occupied* block, if it was rarely rewritten in the past - and move the contents of that (apparently inactive) block to one that has a higher wear level. Now, you might think 'hey, but then it's not just a write, but a read, too, speed is going to suffer !'. Well, there are tricks for that, too - you can do this relocation *in advance*, anticipating writes, when the device is inactive (so, when you have nothing better to do, copy a few rarely used blocks (full or not) to new (high wear) places, and then mark the originating blocks as next up for writing. Lots of magic happening there under the hood. So much in fact, that if you start micromanaging your flash you actually have good chances of making things worse than if you did nothing special (as that's what the system was designed for )