Boot Time

[Kyo]

he said maybe

 

[chad78]

he said maybe
If he's off by 50% - that's still in-freakin-credible. Any stand-by time that's measured in months! is incredible.

I mean, if they aren't just making crap up - (like, I really didn't believe the 100 hour play-time thing - but if it's even close to true) - then this thing is a ground-breaking device on power-consumption (or lack thereof!) alone.

Do you understand what that means? I could be in the middle of a complex puzzle room in a game - or a really tough boss battle - I could have already drained half my battery (five hours) getting to the boss/room - I could then have to leave suddenly, and as I close my Pandora, it falls, safely, behind the couch. I could spend the next THREE WEEKS looking for it. And when I open it back up - I still have over an hour of WiFi-enabled play time before I have to plug it back in!!!!

That is unheard of. That's... wow.

I know, I know he said maybe - I know he said it's untested... But... wow. You could market this thing to Eco-worriers as a way to replace their rainforest raping laptops!

I'm... Seriously guys, I'm impressed.

 

[Squidge]

I can think of no reason that the Pandora should be caching whatever writes it needs to make to the cards. If it does, I can only hope it's a configurable option somewhere that I can just flip off.

It'll default to caching as it'll make the cards last longer. Eg. When the logical block size is smaller than the physical block size, you would read the physical block size (say, 16KB), modify a logical block within that (4KB) and then write it back out. Then an app decides theres more data to come and so the OS has the do the same operation again. So you end up rewriting a single block on the SD card 4 times, when if you cached it, you would only need to write it once.

The OS can't predict how much (or where) you are going to write to an SD card, and considering the limited number of writes, caching can be very useful.

 

[Sphinxter]

If you don't like linux buffer cache mount it with a nobh. You will have to pay attention to the block size though, write less by reading block, modifying then write.

The drawback to this would be read and write performance as you force the machine to read from and write to the disk directly. We'll have to see if we can "cheat" and just simply do that- if we can make it work well off of everything that way, perhaps killing the buffer cache systemwide would be doable and then it could tolerate a straight-up power down with few, if any issues- well none more than with the current crop of handhelds.


Hey hey, don't get me wrong, I never said this was a good idea.