[Arm-netbook] Must watch video of GK802

[jm]

On Fri, 2013-01-11 at 14:02 +0000, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Jan 2013 13:47:27 +0000, jm <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> 
>  wrote:
> 
> >> > This kind of thing should now be possible for all
> >> > these matchbox computers because of f2fs.
> >>
> >> As you can see this was possible long before, despite some new FS.
> >>
> >> > F2fs keeps writing files to new locations and then cycle
> >> > back to the beginning allowing even wear levelling.
> >>
> >> SD cards already do this on the h/w level.
> >
> > I know ssds do it, I wasn't aware sdcards can do it which is why
> > they have a wear problem.
> 
>  They do it at the hardware level, but nowhere nearly as cleverly
>  as a full fat SSD.
> 
>  Similar applies to most USB sticks and CF cards, although
>  there are exceptions among those (some USB sticks contain
>  proper SSD flash controllers, e.g. SuperTalent RC8 - they
>  are essentially SATA SSDs with USB->SATA bridges.
> 
>  For example, see:
>  http://www.altechnative.net/2012/02/07/morebetter-internal-storage-on-the-toshiba-ac100-part-2/
> 
>  IIRC my RC8 even has full SMART functionality I can access using
>  smartctl.
> 
> >> > The great thing is that you can now yank out the OS
> >> > and put a new OS in seconds. No way to brick a device.
> >>
> >> So it's just like any Allwinner A10-based device, while very nice, 
> >> not any
> >> super new achievement either.
> >
> > I was generally under the impression uSD cards are not reliable,
> > but if they got over those problems by fitting it with Android,
> > then its a smart move. With f2fs support, I think any Linux will now 
> > do
> > it properly.
> 
>  As I said before, I'm not all that concerned with reliability and
>  wear leveling, but random-write performance is an issue. For
>  this reason I've been using nilfs2 since it effectively turns
>  all writes into sequential writes, but the garbage collection
>  is a bit nasty the way it's implemented - it causes unnecessary
>  wear by moving data blocks from tail to head even when the block
>  is 100% clean. If it could handle garbage collection in
>  non-contiguous way and do it in order of dirtyness, it would
>  be much, much better. Having read up on f2fs since you
>  mentioned it, it seems to be a decent compromise between
>  nilfs2's total linearity and reasonably efficient garbage
>  collection.

Good.

I think the next target distro is going to have to be an arm ubuntu
that has f2fs for all of us with various A10 devices. I am sure
someone out there will be working on it. Keep a look out I guess.


Any opinions on Freescale quad cores?
I know they have better Linux support than most SoCs but their
stuff is NDA'd for video / 3D and so no one can write any
software for it and make more gadgets and increase their chip sales.

So sad!

Also CPUs are expensive - about $40 I believe.
Is it worth studying Freescale for another variant of EOMA?