No harddrive!

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: No harddrive!
started by: hce_

Posted by hce_ on Mar. 02 2006,23:38

I experience DSL lockups every so often on my Frugal install (to a 64mb flash card) in a system with no hard drives.

I expect this to be caused by the lack of swap space, and once my RAM fills up, everything just locks up.

Is there a way to create a ramdrive on boot, use that for "reserved swap space" so my system doesn't lock up after filling it's ram?

Also, is it possible to mount network shares on boot?

Posted by AwPhuch on Mar. 03 2006,00:43

How much RAM do you have

If you dont have a swapspace I recommend at least 256MB MINIMUM

Yes load the samba.dsl and use the smbmount command in the /opt/bootlocal file

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by hce_ on Mar. 08 2006,22:26

I have 512mb of DDR RAM, which should be plenty, correct? But how do I enable a swap partition in that RAM?

Posted by brianw on Mar. 09 2006,00:20

If you add a ram drive to make it swap space won't that just use the ram you have anyway and leave you exactly the same as you have now (actually once you take into account system overhead you would lose a little). What about another cf card or USB dirve? Are you sure the ram is being maxed? It should take quite a bit to use the over 400 M of ram you should have available.

Posted by hce_ on Mar. 09 2006,03:16

I was hoping that however the kernel manages swap space, it would be more effective than how it handles having no swap space (even if it had less room to work with.)

But no, I'm not 100% sure "full ram" is what's causing my lock ups, I typically come to find the system locked in the morning, or after extended periods of not being used, but not every morning, and not after every extended period of nothing. I have yet to be able to find a pattern either, though it does sometimes lock up if I try to use resource intensive programs (logically).

I am enjoying the system with only the CF card, as it is dead quite (no moving parts) so I'd like to avoid having to put in a hard drive (they are so demanding on power as well) but I can't seem to re-create the stability of a drive-based system

Posted by cbagger01 on Mar. 09 2006,06:24

I would think that you could manually create a ramdisk and format it with FAT and then install a DOS swapfile to this filesystem.

Or maybe even format it directly as a linux swap partition and then activate it.

But since you will be robbing peter to pay paul, I don't know if it will solve your problem.

There are reports of a "memory leak" with using the XVesa server and the Fluxbox window manager.

Maybe you could try booting with:

fb800x600

or instead boot normally and then simply exit back to console (CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE)

and type:

xsetup.sh

and choose xfbdev server

then type

startx

and see if the overnight lockups go away.