Re: Debian on the Sharp Zaurus/SL-5xxx
On Sun 16 Jun, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 06:10:10PM +0100, Miah Gregory wrote:
>
> > The size of the local package database is also a concern. Will any of the
> > planned changes to dpkg address the size of the database, to make it more
> > suitable for limited resource devices?
>
> For my test installation, /var/lib/dpkg is 2.8M of du usage.
That's the sort of things that has put people off dpkg thus far.
> It is interesting to note that the total length of all of the files is
> actually only 1M,
That's still quite a lot.
> or close to 1/3 of that size, so half the space could
> easily be recovered by a filesystem capable of storing small files more
> efficiently than ext2. I have been planning to use jffs for other reasons,
> and I wonder if it has such a capability. reiserfs seems to do very well
> with small files, but I imagine that jffs will be better suited for the
> media.
JFFS2 is very good for NOR flash and the built-in compression helps a lot
with stuff like this. But many people are using CF cards (e.g psion users and
those who can't get what they need in the flash on their ipaqs). JFFS2 is not
a sensible filesystem for CF cards - ext2 (and probably ext3 but I'm not sure
what it's overhead is). reiserfs needs 32MB free space or something
outrageous like that so it's not much use.
If you have NAND flash on board (as newer devices will) then YAFFS is a
useful new FS, that keeps RAM consupmtion down even on quite large flashes.
Not sure how it does on loads of small files as it doesn't have built-in
compression - I'll check.
Wookey
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