Gp2x-gpe

[michu]

i just tested gp2x-gpe and i really like.. the onlydrawback is the more or less long loading time - i think the biggest slowdown is that he need to read 120+MB from the sd. first i used my (old) usb-memstick i took about 5 mins until gpe was up and running.. using my sd card it takes about 2 minutes... now my question:

how can we decrease (=compress) the image? i think mount a gzipped image file is not supported? any ideas?

cheers

 

[MadDog]

I've not tried this, will do in a sec. But I dout its loading 120 megs seing we only have 64 at the most. (excluding sram). I would have though mapping the file to memory then using it from there would help. I have no idea what the app is doing as far as loading so its prob wrong of me to answer. But looking at the Wiki it looks very impresive so a discusion on speeding its loading is worth while if it is as slow as you say.

( Goes and downloads it now.....)

Edit: Thats a cool app, see what you mean about long load times, the docs say it will work better with the sd card formatted as ext2. May get a new SD and give this ago. If it can be made to load quick and runs at a good speed then its a very good alternative.

 

[michu]

I've not tried this, will do in a sec. But I dout its loading 120 megs seing we only have 64 at the most. (excluding sram). I would have though mapping the file to memory then using it from there would help. I have no idea what the app is doing as far as loading so its prob wrong of me to answer. But looking at the Wiki it looks very impresive so a discusion on speeding its loading is worth while if it is as slow as you say.

( Goes and downloads it now.....)

Edit: Thats a cool app, see what you mean about long load times, the docs say it will work better with the sd card formatted as ext2. May get a new SD and give this ago. If it can be made to load quick and runs at a good speed then its a very good alternative.

this 120+ mb file is a ext2-image, so i dont think everything goes to ram, just the main app.. when i had my memstick inside bob i saw it blinking the whole time (=read/writing data to the stick)... thats why i think compressed image = less read op's = faster...

 

[Vimacs]

well, i dont know if gpe writes to the image, but if not you could unpack it and make a squashfs image out of it that would drastical reduce the size.

 

[techFreak]

I have formattted an SD card and mounted the GPE ext2 image on a linux machine. Then copied the contents from image to SD. But GP2X didn't recognized the ext2 file system. Have any idea?

 

[Orkie]

It is much faster on an ext2 SD card. You would probably want a card dedicated to running GPE though since the menu can't automatically mount an SD card formatted as ext2 (not a problem for GPE as you can write a simple launch script and place that in the NAND).
I can't quite see myself why a compressed image would be faster (surely it would be slower since the processor would need to do a lot of work each time you read or write anything). The main reason why GPE runs so much better on a card which is purely ext2 rather than from an ext2 image on a FAT partition is that it has to deal with two file systems at once every time it reads or writes.

If you have a USB hard drive, setting up some swap on that should make things run much more smoothly too.

techFreak: nemonoid has written instructions on how to get ext2 card working: http://darxr.net/pages/gp2x-gpe but a script like this should also work if you place it in NAND and run it when you want to access the SD card:

mountext2.gpu

#!/bin/sh
mount -t ext2 /dev/{whatever the sd card is} /mnt/sd

 

[techFreak]

Great! I'll try this thank you for your help Orkie!

 

[michu]

Great! I'll try this thank you for your help Orkie!

ok i'll try a ext2 sd card... i just resized the gpe ext2 image to 100mb (deleted abiword/gaim/gimp):

128mb image: 22s until splash screen disappears, 2m58 until loaded
100mb image: 13s until splash screen disappears, 1m16 until loaded
the apps running at the same speed...

(fat32 card)

>>can't quite see myself why a compressed image would be faster (surely it would be slower since the processor would need to do a lot of work each time you read or write anything).

hmm whats faster, the cpu or my slow sd card? but i'll for sure try it with a) ext2 fs AND B) swap space. ok i *think" boot time would be faster with a smaller image...

 

[sam fisher]

The CPU decompressing would likely be slower than the SD card.

 

[Emu&Co]

I think one of the main problems is not the both Filesystems. Did some of you already look at the system summary? It says there 1 MB of 30 MB free. Looks like the RAM is the Main Problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but would the MMU Hack not be a nice Idea for the X Server? Then the upper 34 MB of RAM would be fast and more usable, too.

 

[Vimacs]

well, you can create a swap file on sd, just dont do it to often/long so you dont wear it out.
Maybe you could create one just while booting and disable it after that.

 

[michu]

I think one of the main problems is not the both Filesystems. Did some of you already look at the system summary? It says there 1 MB of 30 MB free. Looks like the RAM is the Main Problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but would the MMU Hack not be a nice Idea for the X Server? Then the upper 34 MB of RAM would be fast and more usable, too.

this sound nice, i agree how do we implement the mmu hack? i saw a mmuhack module but i dont think this will work...

 

[Orkie]

Well actually, the program which gives you the free memory total actually uses a lot of that itself You're right though, RAM is the main cause of the speed issues (which is strange as I have run GPE on my iPAQ which only had 32MB RAM and it ran very smoothly, but it was probably running directly off the ROM).

The MMU hack won't do anything to help at the moment, since the X server doesn't use the upper memory. If I were to push things from it into the unused bit of RAM, then it could possibly use 3MB rather than 5MB.

 

[michu]

Great! I'll try this thank you for your help Orkie!

ok i'll try a ext2 sd card... i just resized the gpe ext2 image to 100mb (deleted abiword/gaim/gimp):

128mb image: 22s until splash screen disappears, 2m58 until loaded
100mb image: 13s until splash screen disappears, 1m16 until loaded
the apps running at the same speed...

(fat32 card)

>>can't quite see myself why a compressed image would be faster (surely it would be slower since the processor would need to do a lot of work each time you read or write anything).

hmm whats faster, the cpu or my slow sd card? but i'll for sure try it with a) ext2 fs AND B) swap space. ok i *think" boot time would be faster with a smaller image...

ok i just buy a new 512mb sd card (66x) and created a ext2 partition. i also use 32mb of swap.. the strange thing is, when gp2 is started the swap space is not used!

128mb image: 22s until splash screen disappears, 2m58 until loaded
100mb image: 13s until splash screen disappears, 1m16 until loaded
128mb ext2: 8s until splash screen disappears, 55s until loaded, when i start gpsdrive i had to wait about 3 minutes until it was loaded, thim means 3 times faster than with my slow fat32 sd card

 

[Orkie]

Did you follow the instructions on nemonoid's site to modify the launch script to enable the swap?

 

[michu]

Did you follow the instructions on nemonoid's site to modify the launch script to enable the swap?

jep i did... swapon.. when i enter free in gpe i see my swap file (32mb) but its unised...

another strange thing is, when i enter df -h in the terminal, the terminal dies... dont know why...

 

[xinfernoofdantex]

HOw do you format an SD card in ext2?

 

[BradN]

mke2fs /dev/sda

assuming you want the filesystem on the whole device (not a partition), and /dev/sda is the SD card. It's different on the GP2X itself, I believe, so run 'mount' with a card inserted and active, and then see which device it uses. You may have to grab mke2fs (whatever the actual package name is) from the Debian ARM distribution (or compile it yourself) if the GP2X doesn't have it.

 

[xinfernoofdantex]

Yea, seeing as i'm a total noob, i have no idea what you just said....

 

[BradN]

Well, those are instructions for in linux; I don't know if there's an easy way to do it in windows. If you tell me how big your card is (in sectors), I could make an image file you could write to it with rawrite or something similar (if it allows writing to USB storage?)