[debian] State of annoying memory card corruption bug?

Fox Mulder Quakeman1 at gmx.net
Thu Oct 9 22:36:59 CEST 2008


I put it also on the sd-card. I know that normally that isn't the best
thing, but i don't want to use the internal flash because i want to
reserve it for maybe om2008 or anything i may want to try beneath debian. ;)

I don't "feel" any performace issues with the 64MB swapfile on the
sd-card. More the contrary is the fact. Debian is much smoother because
i don't get all the time to the memory limit when running a few
programs. And the FR or maybe debian itself seems to really dislike it
when the memory consumption gets to the limit.

I just created a swapfile with
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/disk/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536"
"mkswap /media/disk/swapfile"
and than add it to the fstab with the following line
"/media/disk/swapfile   swap   swap   defaults   0 0"

Not it works like a charm. :)

Ciao,
     Rainer

joakim at verona.se wrote:
> Fox Mulder <Quakeman1 at gmx.net> writes:
> 
>> I don't think that this behaviour is a real software bug because this
>> situation shouldn't happen at all. So i don't think that there could be
>> some patch to really fix this.
>>
>> And for me these situations you describe nearly never exist. The problem
>> that the FR hangs occured for me only when the memory usage gets to the
>> limit of the 128MB. But since i use a 64MB swapfile i never experienced
>> it again. And my FR never loosed power since i got it. So i'm wondering
>> what things you do to your FR. ;)
> 
> Bad things I suppose :)
> 
> The swap file sounds like a good idea. Did you put the swap partition on
> the internal flash or the sd card? Intuitively it would appear to be
> better to have the swap on internal flash, if the main os is on the sd
> card.
> 
> 
> 
>> I never lost my partition table and i only use debian for quite some
>> weeks. Anbd i'm happy that the current OM kernel works with
>> suspend/resume without problems.
>>
>> Ciao,
>>      Rainer
>>
>> joakim at verona.se wrote:
>>> Fox Mulder <Quakeman1 at gmx.net> writes:
>>>
>>>> What do you mean by shut down "unexpectedly" ?
>>>>
>>>> The sd-card corruption patch which is in the recent kernels fixes the
>>>> sd-bug when going into suspend and resume which isn't unexpected.
>>> Ok, what I mean is that if the FR hangs for some reason, looses power or
>>> whatever, I must powercycle it to reboot it. When this happens the
>>> debian part of the sd card is unbootable.
>>>
>>> I can then normally rescue it with "testdisk".
>>>
>>> I dont think I ever even tried suspend/resume on debian.
>>>
>>>> joakim at verona.se wrote:
>>>>> Fox Mulder <Quakeman1 at gmx.net> writes:
>>>>>
>>>>>> The kernel shipped with debian has the corruption bug.
>>>>>> To update your kernel you must do it by hand. The instruction how to do
>>>>>> this is in the debian page in the openmoko wiki [1].
>>>>>> I changed my /boot partition from vfat to ext2 and symlink the
>>>>>> boot-kernel to the one i want to use because i switch between the actual
>>>>>> OM and FSO kernels.
>>>>> I followed the instructions and installed a new kernel. I still get the
>>>>> corruption bug whenever I shut down the FR unexpectedly.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Ciao,
>>>>>>      Rainer
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> [1]
>>>>>> http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Debian#How_to_replace_the_default_kernel_with_a_recent_openmoko_kernel>>>>>> joakim at verona.se wrote:
>>>>>>> Fox Mulder <Quakeman1 at gmx.net> writes:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Which kernel and from when do you use?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> This bug should be fixed in newer kernels. But i still use the apm
>>>>>>>> suspend/resume script which works for me since i installed debian.
>>>>>>> Ok, how do I ensure I have a newer kernel? I just use the kernel shipped
>>>>>>> with Debian, I think.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Ciao,
>>>>>>>>      Rainer
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> joakim at verona.se wrote:
>>>>>>>>> It is rather annoying to fix the memory card whenever it gets corrupted
>>>>>>>>> and wont boot. I know there are workaround scripts, but they dont work
>>>>>>>>> for me, since I most often get corruption after booting after unexpected
>>>>>>>>> power down.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Is there any progress on this bug? Any working workarounds ?
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>




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