Does it make sense to have the kernel use a swap partition?

Al Johnson openmoko at mazikeen.demon.co.uk
Thu Jul 24 18:10:01 CEST 2008


On Thursday 24 July 2008, Jim Colton wrote:
> If so, what are the consequences to the longevity of the SD Card?

Depends what you're doing I suppose. It'll be relatively slow; the SD and the 
graphics data both go over the same relatively restricted bus. If you need 
more than the available RAM for something and aren't worried about the 
performance hit then it may be worth it.

As for the lifetime of the card, I doubt it'll be a problem. I've seen 
calculations suggesting the lifetime for continuous random writes on flash 
drives is now in years. In practise I've seen machines with CF cards as their 
only storage and reasonably heavy write usage that have an uptime approaching 
3 years. I've not seen CF fail due to excessive writes in about 4 years of 
using them, and I suspect SD is now similar.





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