Funny you telling me that I have *NOT* read the thread... I am not going to argue about this since I did and unless you are spying over my back this is just a weird assumption...

And about getting enough space... There will *ALWAYS* be users trying to stuff the device with zillions of apps and whatever restrictions in terms of space, no matter how technical, will not convince the-average-joe.

I have an N800 and boot from mmc, and tried a swap partition on both the same, and on the secondary mmc, and in either case it was always slow and laggy.

I recently installed Ramzez, and turned off the swap partition, now things run a lot smoother, but I can't open as many programs at once since the swap size now is much smaller than my swap partition.

Why weird? If you want to find out how I reasoned about that, see below.

The thread has made it pretty clear that, if you want to, you can install applications using every available byte in the mass storage available on the device, if that is NAND or whatever monster micro-SD card you install. So: The problem raised in the original posting is a red herring, and continuing to complaining about it doesn't make any sense.

(If, on the other hand, your meaning was that people will start complaining not because they can't use all the room, but that there isn't enough room (as in: wanting to install 70GB of applications), then there's no reason to continue the discussion either.)

According to a thread on conversations.nokia.com (via Engadget):

Peter@MaemoMarketing Reply:
August 28th, 2009 at 8:00 am

Eldar from Mobile-Review has quite old software, so, please don’t read his review as representative of the final software. We have changed the partitioning of the storage to give more install space to apps. Final numbers will be visible closer to sales start, but there is already now plenty.

http://conversations.nokia.com/2009/...#comment-10175

Hi! Please see the post number 6 and its responses on the first page of this thread for your concerns.

This thread topic wording is severely misleading at this point. I am also a bit sorry that I pointed this memory thing out too as an example of silly misinformation contained in proto previews. A bit similarly, have been watching very amused by the spreading of my awkward chosen term "extensive" preview in the web lately..

awsome, i knew Peter was the best !

Fsck Windoze....I'll use the full 32Gb as ext3

I haven't touched M$ crap for over a decade.

I've also used OS from original root flash sometime, and i agree it was a bit faster (main difference is large applications start time and boot time), but that was not a big change in usability for me. I feel the main performance limitation on n810 has been small RAM + slow swap.

But I think Nokia choose the right solution for N900, because it will be adequate for 99% of users, and any performance improvement is important because i'm sure people will post video on youtube with speed comparison between iphone and n900 for basic tasks .

And people who will prefer to have the convenience of a large root filesystem (even with some trade-off) will be able to do it.

BTW N900 will also run "optified" applications from mmc, so I assume you'll get no gain (or small one because of system shared libs used) for third party applications.


PS: You gave me an idea: I'll try to put my swap on the small and fast flash memory. Anyone tried this ?

You can use ramzez and swap partition at the same time.
Just make sure ramzez has an higher swap priority so it will be used first. Swap partition will be used only when ramzez is full.
Maybe some information here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=32105

Hmm, even boot times? That's interesting. I haven't noticed anything like that. Maybe there is some difference in setup? here are my details:

- I'm using ext2 (with noatime) for N8x0. It is pretty stable so ext3 is not needed, For 770 I was using ext3 since it reboots more often. ext2 block size is default (4096), I've experimented with smaller block (to save space with small files) but it was slower. Most probably the bigger block the better (default FAT filesystem on SD cards uses 32kilobytes) but maybe it is not so critical, linux kernel should merge I/O requests for adjacent blocks.

- I'm also using kernel with high-speed (48MHz) sd/mmc mode (on N8x0 it speeds up mmc raw read speed from ~6MB/s to ~10MB/s).

- I have metalayer-crawler disabled (it does a lot of card scanning which takes many minutes after boot or card change, bugzilla link mentioned in previous post).

- I have also lowered priority of mmcqd kernel threads from -5(?) to 0 since with default raised priority it sometimes causes audio skips in playback and may block other threads. 0 was default in kernels before 2.6.18, I never understood why they raised it (bug or feature?). maybe this is the reason why your device freezes when swapping? mmcqd eats a lot of cpu when writing to the card. This can be changed by running renice 0 `pidof mmcqd` as root (in some startup script and when cards are inserted (/usr/sbin/osso-mmc-mount.sh).

- it should also help to change cpu frequency setting from ondemand to performance or raise the minimum frequency (to 330 or even 400) since there is a kernel bug/feature - lower cpu clock lowers also mmc bus clock which slows sd/mmc I/O down when cpu is idle (can happen quite often when CPU waits for data). It can make battery life shorter when cpu is used a lot, it shouldn't make much difference when cpu is idle.

you mean the internal 256MB flash? Well it is not a block device so there is no simple and effective way to swap to it. It would need some FTL that will emulate block device over it.

As for ramzez, thanks for link. Will try.