Re: "Expanding" memory of an armel device?
On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 09:47:13AM -0300, Rogério Brito wrote:
> My kurobox pro (an armel orion5x machine) has a very limited amount of
> memory ("only" 128MB). Unfortunately, it seems that the programs in Debian
> are only getting bigger not only on disk, but also requiring more memory
> (and this includes the Linux kernel).
>
> It constantly needs to use swap and running a simple `apt-get update &&
> apt-get upgrade` (with pdiffs disabled) is super painful, taking many
> minutes to run.
>
> Since we don't have zram or similar modules in our kernel to try to
> alleviate the situation, I was thinking of, perhaps, using some kind of fast
> solid state memory to be used as swap.
>
> Unfortunately, (I have not tested this yet) it seems that using a USB thumb
> drive wouldn't help much: the speed that I get from the SATA HD reading
> sequentially from the swap partition with `ddrescue` is about 40MB/s and I
> expect a USB thumb drive to be considerably slower (of course, there would
> be some extra factors to factor in, like the latency of accesses---I suspect
> that the disk seeks in the HD to be non-negligible during the swap
> activities).
>
> That being said, the kurobox pro has a PCI Express connector. Is there any
> cheap peripheral that I could buy that would help me with the task of
> "expanding" the memory of this NAS?
Well you would have to run it with the PCIe device sticking out of the
box with the box not assembled given where the connector is placed.
I don't know if zram would help on such a slow CPU, but maybe it would.
I suppose it really depends whether ram or cpu is the resource you
lack most.
--
Len Sorensen
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