Enhancing running on SD

Thanks to feedback from mavrothal and others, there have been excellent links to read.

I found these two also:
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/
http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/disks.php

I am implementing many of the ideas into the next alpha. I have created a new file, /etc/rc.d/BOOTCONSTRAINED, which has various variables to set how the system can be constrained at bootup.

For example, the "VM writeback time" defaults to 5 seconds, I have changed that to 15 (see second link above).

I have changed the default I/O scheduler to 'deadline' (see first link above).

This is in addition to my SD image now having partitions with 4MB alignment. Also, the main filesystem mounts with 'relatime' (only updates access-time of files sometimes).

The next alpha will also use ext2 and swap will be off (even though the SD card has a swap partition).

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Comments

ext4 without journal
Username: BarryK
I am also considering building the next alpha with ext4 but no journal.

Tags: woof