Re: Hibernation
> >No... it makes sense if you care about speed... and for the fact that even
> >if you have a Gig of RAM, you can't get rid of swap entirely without getting
> >mired in molasses. [I am told that the code for dealing with a swapless
>
> So you create a 1M partition for swap then. Using RAM as swap will not gain
> you anything. At best it won't be used and will just be a waste of memory
> that could otherwise be used for disk cache. At worst you will have programs
> being paged to it which means copying data to/from the memory area which
> wastes CPU time.
If it's there it will be used. Therefore during system operations the disk
will be hit. If you are so insanely sensitive that you can "feel" the diff
between hitting disk and hitting RAM - notice I haven't said I'm using the
trick - then your measly scrap of swap could be on... more RAM. There is
probably even some optimal size for the silly thing.
> With 64bit memory it will take 512 reads and 512 writes to copy a 4K page of
> memory. If the memory is 10ns then it'll be 10*1024 == 10240ns to copy the
> page. That's 4096 clock cycles on a modern CPU.
Not useful statistic without a similar analysis of how many cycles paging
the same amount a disk takes - and straying off things that are specific to
laptops, nor debian.
> >system is not real efficient.] Not that I've seen a laptop with a gig yet
> >- but we tend to have slower CPUs overall, and we're more interested in
> >making our expensive toy last longer, so maybe we would want all the speed
> >improvements we can get.
>
> Having slower CPUs also means that we need to conserve their power more too.
> That means not using swap-to-RAM, putting plenty of RAM in the system (so the
> CPU doesn't block on paging), and doing anything else reasonable to get
> effective use of CPU power.
hard disk = motor = conserves lots to not have it spin, if you have an old
enough monster. Betcha motors cost more than bit flips.
> Currently I am using the Xserver-fbdev which can't take advantage of the
> co-processed features of my video card and wastes CPU power and energy.
> I plan to write a Neomagic FrameBuffer driver and then try and get the
> xserver-fbdev co-prossing patches going (they apparently work well on Power
> Macintosh).
Isn't Neomagic supported directly in the latest X? Why use a non-optimal
server?
> >In theory any slimline drive should fit, I just haven't considered opening
> >the case and doing that yet.
>
> What I would like to see is a laptop that supports multiple hard drives.
> RAID-1 on desktop features is starting to become common (it will become
> especially common when the Raidtools2 stuff gets into the mainstream kernel).
> I think that we need the same in laptops. Also for more serious use they
> should sell laptops with support for 4 hard drives to run RAID-10.
I have an IDE adapter cable, and it's possible to get a SCSI one, but that
wouldn't really do what you want. The Omnibook 800 - as far as I can tell
unique among laptops - has its internal SCSI bus accessible as an external
port, so you should be able to hang a whole chain off of it. Helluva docking
station you get there :)
If the focus of laptops is to be portable - what sort of task needs to
carry a half-terabyte around with you *regularly*? Or are you looking for
the parity/stability which RAID is supposed to offer - why wouldn't the
upcoming journaling be enough? Just curious...
On a different note there are 47 Gb SCSI drives running around now. That's
a single drive for a desktop system, but ... it's a funny thing, if I could
jump from 3.2 Gb to 26 or 47 Gb instead of merely 10 or 12, I think I'd be
more seriously considering it! So I eagerly await if they can get them down
to our size and power requirements. Obviously some people are willing to
carry anything, given some of the monster notebooks coming out, so I'm not
going to call weight a strong factor.
In case anyone's wondering why it would make the difference, at 10 or 12,
I still feel constrained to be frugal, so I probably would only use about
4 Gb of them. At 47 I could carry mirrors of all the websites I maintain and
still have room for my devwork on them. IOW it would more seriously buck
for the position my desktop holds - though nothing in laptops rivals having
a 21" monitor when doing graphics work. Yet.
> >Mine is full at 96 Mb and if it were a little faster to hibernate it would
> >be perfect.
> >
> >I don't do enough on my laptop to use it up anyway, though I sometimes blow
> >past the original 32 Mb, so it was worth it to fill 'er up.
>
> When you move to a journalled file system you may feel the need for more RAM.
> Journalling does result in a larger working-set for the cache system...
If I feel the need for more RAM than 96M I'll just plain be stuck, because
it's maxed out.
Not sure I'll go journalled actually. I have a desktop to which I actively
copy, and I do mail on the main system, not my laptop, so it doesn't have that
obvious heavy activity... rather like the way most handheld users have to
treat their PDA, I think, only without the cradle. If the thing went up in
flames right now, I'd fetch back my tarball from a few days ago, as soon as
I got Base installed on the new system.
> I spend less money on laptops than most people spend on cars...
That's good, very few laptops cost 32 k$. Though
<pipe dream>
an 8.5-10 pound laptop with a half Gb of memory (expandable further) with
2 internal, 1 swappable drive bays (options 10 Gb through 38 Gb in size)
with [whatever the latest rage in perfected laptop monitors is] plus builtin
CD/DVD capable, real stereo access, Video4Linux supported vidtuner graphics
card,
</pipe dream>
might start getting there.
-* Heather Stern * Starshine Technical Services * star@starshine.org *-
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