Quality Control

[Sphinxter]

Wrong, we're using the one from 2.6.34-rc with compat-wireless. Full 2.6.34-rc1 setup was tested and no improvement was found regarding wifi.

Sorry, I was told you were desperately working off of 2.6.27 the last time I asked about it.

Believe it or not but .34-rc has certain issues than our current .27 setup doesn't, and there is no time to sort them now so close to release. And I think you can survive without ext4.

I have absolutely no doubt about that, but given the timeframe I'd say there's probably been plenty of time to switch upwards in the list, at least a version or 2. Keep in mind that .27 was released in October 2008. And as for me and ext4, I love it specifically because of extents, and it was introduced (not ext4dev, but ext4) in .29 I believe. Incidentally, that kernel also provided the final stability nail for the ath5k driver, so I have an unnatural attachment to it. Sure I can live without ext4, but having to reformat an ext2 card to ext4 later is going to be a hassle. I know you can just mount it as ext4, but my experience with that has been that it doesn't do jack for performance and kept on trucking with large indirect block tables instead of extents, which absolutely kills performance on my crappy hard disks at least.
tl;dr: my external hard disk went from 21MB/s to 30MB/s avg. write speed simply from switching from ext3 to ext4 (and runs at 12-15MB/s on FAT32/NTFS). I of course have no idea whether the SDHC card bus will limit my class 4 card or the card/filesystem will

Lesson learned: updating the kernel can give impressive results

This is not always the case.

Hence the "can" clause.

Actually it's your SDHC card that can live without a journaled filesystem.

 

[zhasha]

Actually it's your SDHC card that can live without a journaled filesystem.

And that's why it's currently formatted as ext4 without a journal.

 

[sparkymark]

If it is already running at 45KB'sec thats not that slow, Damn I remember dialup, this is just under 1/2meg dsl, plenty for browsing no, or does it appear to run slower? Perfectly fine for browsing, reading forums, etc. I'd imagine most hardcore downloading would be done on a main PC, and then transferred to the Pandora (hmmm, although that might take a while unless you transfer via the SD card, but anyway you get my jist).

 

[torpor]

2.6.27 is good, i hear, for the SGX blobs and other fairly rigid aspects of the gaming/media experience yet to be fully experienced in all its glory.

jumping up to last nights patches would only be feasible as an option if there were a build server and .. say, 1000 pandoras being played with in the field.

from my point of view the wlan issue is important because we're all going to go from using the forums to annoy each other about this, to some multiplayer game or two that is exclusive to the pandora .. but dongles are fine, we all have one. probably some of us have two.

 

[trix]

Until the wifi is fixed and working, why not just write some drivers/software to share internet through Bluetooth? I've had my Gentoo PC get it's internet from my iPhone's USB Cable before... if I can do THAT, sharing internet over bluetooth (or maybe with a USB cable for faster speeds) from PC to Pandora should be an easy workaround until WiFi works. And save a mint on WiFi Dongles.

- trix

 

[Prometheus]

Is that solution assuming that everybody owns a mobile telephone...?

 

[Ollonk]

They could include USB dongles for sharing PCs at a cost of less than $3 each for any who would take them and then provide Wifi Dongles for people who request them. (Just a suggestion, doesn't quite work for on-the-go stuff, though.)

 

[Sphinxter]

Actually it's your SDHC card that can live without a journaled filesystem.

And that's why it's currently formatted as ext4 without a journal.

So it's ext2, don't see a problem unless your SDHC card needs to break the 64 bit barrier.

 

[zhasha]

Actually it's your SDHC card that can live without a journaled filesystem.

And that's why it's currently formatted as ext4 without a journal.

So it's ext2, don't see a problem unless your SDHC card needs to break the 64 bit barrier.

Proving you have no idea what ext4 brings to the table. Firstly there's the multiblock allocator, but that can technically (not yet practically to my knowledge) be used on an ext2 partition. Secondly you have extents, which is a fancy way of storing roughly 100MB of consecutive data on the disk rather than use ridonculously large indirection tables as is done in ext3/2.

ext3 = ext2 + journal.

ext4 brings a horde of improvements that generally gives superior performance in the large file area, which incidentally is the one I care about.

EDIT:
Oh and I almost forgot: It's not backwards compatible with ext3/2

 

[conso]

DJWillis and Notaz can decide themselves when to switch to a new kernel [and probably (re)do a lot of tinkering, patching and debugging], no need for you to make so much fuzz out of it. They are already submitting code upstream, so it might be easier to switch to the upcoming stable kernel then to the current.