Text 6062, 115 rader
Skriven 2006-05-13 10:46:48 av Kenneth Parrish (8:8/2)
   Kommentar till text 6046 av Maurice Kinal (1:140/13.1)
Ärende: Re: sensors, pnpbios
============================
-=> Maurice Kinal wrote to Kenneth Parrish <=-

 MK> Hey Kenneth!

Hello !  :)

 MK> May 09 23:12 06, Kenneth Parrish wrote to Maurice Kinal:

Re: CF-cards benefit an 80486-based system
 KP> absolutely. btw there's been a pretty good thread about flash
 KP> memory on the linux-kernel@vger.. list. they say the wear-leveling
 KP> algorithms aren't all the same and some are a bit better, and the
 KP> larger the memory the longer it may tend to remain usable with
 KP> repeated writes.

 MK> The only writes are the intitial install of ramdisk and kernel.
 MK>  I don't need to upgrade them that often and the logfiles are
 MK> written to ramspace. Everything else, such as downloads, are to
 MK> external drives.  A good flashdisk will last longer then I do.
check, check, check, well maybe (you could surprise everyone and outlive one or
more of them, eh?).

 KP> ... [a]thread about caching data for faster application startup
 KP> and booting,

 MK> The entire OS is in ramspace.  No need for caching.  There is
 MK> more then enough ram and if I use the concept for multimedia
 MK> apps the external sata drive can easily handle it ... and then
 MK> some.
Uhhuh, okay, sure  :-)

 KP> mentions that microsoft's new windows version might possibly use
 KP> flash memory, optionally, to cache often-used data as an energy
 KP> saver.

 MK> No need to. ram is cheap and faster then any disk, flash or
 MK> otherwise.  None of this has been an issue here, not on the 486
 MK> and definetly not on the smp guy ... and now a p4 guy.  Only the
 MK> intitial install requires writing to the flashdisk.  It should
 MK> last at least 10 years as per specs for data retention and then
 MK> it should be a simple matter of upgrading.  I figure if things go
 MK> well a good ide flash disk will outlast any computer and more then
 MK> likely my lifetime.  Writes are definetly not an issue with me and
 MK> if they are I'll use external drives.
it's combining various acpi power saving things, maybe sleep, suspend to ram,
and and suspend to disk, with the flash-mem caching, that may offer improved
performance and power savings (most important; portables)

[ smp p3 933x2 ]
 MK> Looks good from this angle.  Some source has problems but not
 MK> the good stuff. I get a kick out of some of the multimedia apps
 MK> thinking that the two p3's are one +4GHz Coppermine processor.
 MK> Ever hear of one of those?  :-)
you may be ready if/when, perhaps its saying :)

 MK> It works great overall, other then minor problems.  I probably have
 MK> less problems then most people do with single processors but then
 MK> again I am extremely brutal when it comes to apps and am not afraid
 MK> to give them the heave-ho when they can't play nice.
perhaps with hyperthreading and dual core chips comin' along, you'll see more
and more done for this smp hardware's benefit.  one can hope.

 KP> i did a 'simple profile' described at ../kernel/Documentation/..
 KP> and found acpi has some constant overhead, but i gather it's not
 KP> bad.

 MK> When it works.  Not an option on the smp guy as it is definetly
 MK> flakey. Luckily it can be safely ignored and turned off in the
 MK> bios.
yeah, if you have time, you could send a bug report. intel has some people (Len
Brown, Venkatesh Pallipadi, and others) working wiht the linux kernel list
folks on acpi and other things, as do novell, ibm, and others.

 KP> there's a small latency to go from processor acpi sleep states to
 KP> active, but it seems negligible: how much is saved, i wonder. :-)

 MK> I've heard a few horror stories about acpi lowering the life
 MK> expectancy of HDs.  I have no idea if that is true.  Never bothered
 MK> with power management with drives before and mine seem to outlast
 MK> others with the exact same drives. Seems to me there could be
 MK> something to the horror stories.
i don't see a mechanism for acpi functions to affect disk life, but then, i
don't see a lot of things, hehe. such as...

 KP> ... i haven't seen much info about apm settings.

 MK> Other then what I know to be true by not using power management
 MK> for drives I can't really say for sure.
i can't say, don't mind leaving it on 192, but it might be interesting to learn
more of what it does.

 MK> gfortran isn't f95.  I tried compiling a couple of math libs
 MK> with it and it seems to work fine with f77 code.  Got a couple
 MK> of warnings about 'goto' statements that I thought were
 MK> amusing.  I recall when I was first learning fortran that
 MK> goto's are evil.  Seems to me they've gotten less anal about
 MK> that over time.  Tsk, tsk.

 MK> Pretty well much compatible already other then some syntax changes.
 MK> Also supposedly compatible with f90 code.  I don't know and
 MK> it has been quite some time for me fortran-wise.  I need to
 MK> refresh my memory on this stuff and perhaps learn f90/95.  We'll
 MK> see.  Upgraded to gmp-4.2 and that took care of the mpfr memory
 MK> allocation issue.
i didn't know those were connected. the mpfr lib at the debian ftp site runs to
about a megabyte tarred and gzipped. regarding the new fortran support and
older software (mine was from some old frebsd cd-roms), i think an
environmental variable or something simple like that might possibly have needed
setting...

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