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Say I want to do something real using the E3. The hardware's certainly up to it, and the form factor is great, but as soon as I start doing anything using serious software (such as Debian), I'm going to run out of RAM. So, I'm going to need swap space.
Are there any alternatives to plugging in a USB1 hard disk, sharing the single port with all my other devices?
While I have, in the past, used Sun workstations that swapped over a 10Mbps ethernet cable with roughly similar bandwidth to that USB port, it wasn't a pleasant experience. It would be really nice to be able to get hold of some higher-bandwidth conduit. Even just being able to dedicate a complete USB1 port rather than having to share would be an improvement; the boot logs say that there are three ports --- are any of them brought out to headers on the motherboard?
Failing that, any other suggestions?
- -- +- David Given --McQ-+ | dg@cowlark.com | "Those that repeat truisms, are also forced to | (dg@tao-group.com) | repeat them." --- Anonymous from Slashdot +- www.cowlark.com --+
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, David Given wrote:
Failing that, any other suggestions?
Learn to build distributions appropriate to the hardware available? There's no earthly reason that anything the 5910 is capable of should need more RAM than you have available. If you want to run GNOME or something on it, you're going to have a horrible shock when you find out how badly it runs X11, never mind the other stuff that's involved.
-J.
On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 07:36:20PM +0000, jasmine@electronpusher.org wrote:
Learn to build distributions appropriate to the hardware available? There's no earthly reason that anything the 5910 is capable of should need more RAM than you have available. If you want to run GNOME or something on it, you're going to have a horrible shock when you find out how badly it runs X11, never mind the other stuff that's involved.
While I'd agree that the hardware isn't really up to running GNOME, there's omap hardware out there that's running X11 on unaccelerated framebuffers without too much misery. What's the issue with it on the E3?
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Matthew Garrett wrote:
While I'd agree that the hardware isn't really up to running GNOME, there's omap hardware out there that's running X11 on unaccelerated framebuffers without too much misery. What's the issue with it on the E3?
OMAPs pre-OMAP2420 suck at X font rendering, universally, though I agree that on small screens they're not quite as bad. As for the E3, the very slow screen makes mouse pointers really, really unpleasant to use.
Also, X uses far too much RAM, and X applications tend to use too much floating point maths (ie., any at all) for the 925 to perform adequately. On top of that, there's the appalling memcpy() performance of ARM9 cores to consider.
-J.
On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 08:07:47PM +0000, jasmine@electronpusher.org wrote:
OMAPs pre-OMAP2420 suck at X font rendering, universally, though I agree that on small screens they're not quite as bad. As for the E3, the very slow screen makes mouse pointers really, really unpleasant to use.
Right, the quality of the screen is a serious problem. Nokia have managed to run X respectably on the 770, which is based on the 1710 - admittedly it's got twice as much RAM and a few more MHz than the E3, but still.
Also, X uses far too much RAM, and X applications tend to use too much floating point maths (ie., any at all) for the 925 to perform adequately. On top of that, there's the appalling memcpy() performance of ARM9 cores to consider.
I've happily run X on ARM9 devices with 32MB of RAM in the past, but it's certainly not something that I'd expect a generic distribution to be good at.
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Right, the quality of the screen is a serious problem. Nokia have managed to run X respectably on the 770, which is based on the 1710 - admittedly it's got twice as much RAM and a few more MHz than the E3, but still.
And a better cache, and the memory bus is twice as fast, and it has a burst doubler so it gets about three times the memory bandwidth, and Harvard TLBs (which makes a huge difference under Linux.)
-J.
jasmine@electronpusher.org wrote:
OMAPs pre-OMAP2420 suck at X font rendering, universally, though I agree that on small screens they're not quite as bad. As for the E3, the very slow screen makes mouse pointers really, really unpleasant to use.
But do you really need a mouse? If you tailor the applications and window manager for keyboard use then sucky mouse pointer performance shouldn't matter. If an app has been written with accessibility in mind, then it should already be usable with just a keyboard.
Also, X uses far too much RAM, and X applications tend to use too much floating point maths (ie., any at all) for the 925 to perform adequately. On top of that, there's the appalling memcpy() performance of ARM9 cores to consider.
But X gives you networking, so you can run the apps on something with a lot more power and access them via the E3. If you don't mind the E3 no longer being a stand alone machine then the networking potential of X brings a lot of possibilities.
Scot
On 22 Mar 2006, at 11:45, Scot McSweeney-Roberts wrote:
But X gives you networking, so you can run the apps on something with a lot more power and access them via the E3. If you don't mind the E3 no longer being a stand alone machine then the networking potential of X brings a lot of possibilities.
If that's what you're after, NX or VNC would be far more appropriate.
-J.
Jasmine Strong wrote:
On 22 Mar 2006, at 11:45, Scot McSweeney-Roberts wrote:
But X gives you networking, so you can run the apps on something with a lot more power and access them via the E3. If you don't mind the E3 no longer being a stand alone machine then the networking potential of X brings a lot of possibilities.
If that's what you're after, NX or VNC would be far more appropriate.
But NX sits on top of X, ie the client needs a local X Server. I suppose you could write a direct to framebuffer NX client, but then you'd have effectively written an X Server with the compressed X tricks of NX built in.
VNC is (usually) "all or nothing" - the entire desktop would be served from the server, with X you can pick and choose what runs where (so you can still have local X apps if appropriate). While VNC can allegedly be bashed into serving just applications, I've never seen this done (I've only ever seen it listed as a suggestion for future improvement to VNC servers and clients).
Scot
Scot McSweeney-Roberts wrote:
Jasmine Strong wrote:
On 22 Mar 2006, at 11:45, Scot McSweeney-Roberts wrote:
But X gives you networking, so you can run the apps on something with a lot more power and access them via the E3. If you don't mind the E3 no longer being a stand alone machine then the networking potential of X brings a lot of possibilities.
If that's what you're after, NX or VNC would be far more appropriate.
But NX sits on top of X, ie the client needs a local X Server. I suppose you could write a direct to framebuffer NX client, but then you'd have effectively written an X Server with the compressed X tricks of NX built in.
VNC is (usually) "all or nothing" - the entire desktop would be served from the server, with X you can pick and choose what runs where (so you can still have local X apps if appropriate). While VNC can allegedly be bashed into serving just applications, I've never seen this done (I've only ever seen it listed as a suggestion for future improvement to VNC servers and clients).
Umm maybe I am just being a bit naive about all this but is there any reason one cannot use Nano-X (http://www.microwindows.org/) seems to work of other platforms?
Just a thought.
Don.
jasmine@electronpusher.org wrote: [...]
Learn to build distributions appropriate to the hardware available? There's no earthly reason that anything the 5910 is capable of should need more RAM than you have available. If you want to run GNOME or something on it, you're going to have a horrible shock when you find out how badly it runs X11, never mind the other stuff that's involved.
Aside from the fact that the E3 has more memory than the first machine I ran X on, I'm quite aware of its limitations. I don't want to run X. What I *do* want to do is to run headless Debian; building a distribution is a significantly bigger and more complex job than is really worth doing, and using a known good distribution that runs on the ARM will save vast, vast quantities of grief.
However, as soon as you start using server software you start running into issues where you can't put fixed bounds on the amount of memory your system will use. While *most* of the time that 32MB will be ample, *occasionally* memory usage will peak at larger values than that. (apt itself, for example, tends to chew large quantities of RAM for just a few seconds on startup.) I don't want to run using swap, but I do need to have it available just in case --- have you ever seen Linux run out of hard memory? It's really not pretty.
If you take a look at miniature ARM distributions such as Familiar, you'll see that even they recommend a IBM microdrive to swap onto, for exactly these reasons --- but the E3 doesn't have a PCMCIA slot.
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006, David Given wrote:
Aside from the fact that the E3 has more memory than the first machine I ran X on
Oh really. Yeah, X11 has changed a bit since I ran it on a 2Mbyte machine with a 30MHz processor.
, I'm quite aware of its limitations. I don't want to run X. What I
*do* want to do is to run headless Debian; building a distribution is a significantly bigger and more complex job than is really worth doing, and using a known good distribution that runs on the ARM will save vast, vast quantities of grief.
No, it won't, because, and this is the important part, it won't fit into the only fast backing store you have available. Trust me- I've built more ARM-based appliances than you can shake a stick at, and I've used a tiny distribution every time. And, yes- I did run server software. I even ran a java VM on one particular (8Mbyte!) platform. You just need to make sure the server software is appropriate to the hardware- saying "oh well I just need to use some swap" isn't the answer. Your project will not end happily.
-J.
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