[Arm-netbook] Logging and journaling

[Benson Mitchell]

On Feb 8, 2017 10:19 AM, "Julie Marchant" <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:
> Besides, swap isn't a solution to low RAM, it's a failsafe. Some people
> might find the cost of degrading a microSD card to be worth that
> failsafe, as opposed to just letting some programs crash, but I think
> most people would prefer the latter option for the most part.

But if you really use it as a failsafe (that is, very rarely, and only
long enough to notice the slowdown and close some programs), it
doesn't degrade the flash much at all. It's only, IMO, a big deal when
you're trying to pretend your system has more RAM than it does, and
thus using swap regularly.

As you say, different people will make different choices, but for me
swap-on-SD is clearly worth it, so if/when an out-of-memory condition
_does_ occur, I get a chance to choose which processes live and die,
and to make sure any important work is saved properly. I don't wholly
distrust the kernel OOM killer's heuristics, but heuristics are never
perfect, and the cost in flash usage seems very reasonable to me.

However, since the default needs to be one or the other, and we can't
even know that users will _have_ a microSD card in it, I'd agree that
the factory image should have swap disabled. But I'd say it should
have documentation or scripts to make it easy for end users to enable
swap on removable (thus replaceable) storage if they want to. And it
_definitely_ shouldn't ship with a kernel or userland incapable of
swapping, like some Android devices I've used; but I expect we all
agree on that.


Benson Mitchell