Thread: [Announce] ereswap - anti swap-fragmentation tool in repos
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reinob is offline reinob
2012-06-02 , 17:13
Posts: 1,808 | Thanked: 4,272 times | Joined on Feb 2011 @ Germany
#65
Originally Posted by hxka View Post
There is no such term “optified Linux system”. There is a term “Nokia's engineers”.
I didn't say what to do, I told the basics of filesystem hierarchy.
And the one of the basics is that package management system should not touch users home directories.
Of course on maemo there is /opt, in which you have to put large files to not to wipe free space on rootfs (and make symlinks in proper places). But this package contain only few little scripts which won't affect free space on rootfs at all.
As for $HOME/.blahblah, these directories are for user-specific configuration files. Again, /etc is for system-wide configuration files.
+1, although I'd say for now it's fine (it's extras-devel we're talking about).

On the fragmentation topic. Even if Flash acts like RAM, where the access time is essentially constant, you can still be affected by fragmentation, in the same way as with RAM.

Imagine you need to allocate a chunk of 100MB (in Flash or in RAM, doesn't matter), and the biggest chunk you have available is only 16MB, the next is 12MB, the next is maybe 8MB, etc.

You'd need to either chain-allocate your chunk (if your program, or the Linux kernel in this case, supports such "complex" memory management), or compact the memory (i.e. defrag) so that all free blocks get together, so that memory (swap) allocation will become fast(er) again.

The latter is what Estel's script essentially does, at least implicitly.
 

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