On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Heather wrote: >Heather: >>>Would it be possible to use that under Dosemu+DOS so that you can force >>>which >>>partition is visible as "D:" then do it? >> >> Maybe. But unless you have really good backups you probably don't want to >> try it. Just imagine the bios dumping 100M of data over your favourite file >> system. > >The Magio is extremely clear on whether it can, or it cannot, hibernate. I >do not believe that it would attempt any such thing.
You have more faith in your computer's BIOS than I have in mine. >>>Comparing enough hibernation volumes, could someone create a linux >>>mktpadswap? >>>Maybe it could encompass or call ext2resize and mkdosfs, and do the whole >>>task - carve off the right amount of diskspace for your ram, get it into the >>>partition table, format it, and put the hibernate volume in there. Easy >>>enough to get -blank- hibernate volumes, just scrap one and recreate it. >>>(Too >>>late for us, but we can save next year's crop of users.) >> >> Maybe. I think that the BIOS looks through the file system structures >> though. It's the only explanation I know of for Thinkpads only supporting >> 64M of RAM for hibernation to HPFS volumes... > >I didn't know about that limit - that sucks. That still doesn't make clear >whether the limit is that the file be contiguous, or that it be on a formatted >filesystem. True. However I think that the limit is related to HPFS having allocation bitmaps which refer to 16M of data. So they probably only have BIOS code for looking through 4 allocation areas. If it was blocks on disk then it would be no more difficult to support >64M for HPFS than for FAT. >> >(Anybody here using swap-to-ramdisk tricks so they don't need linux swap >> >space on disk at all? Then hibernating would capture your swap too.) >> >> Swap to ramdisk only makes sense on broken hardware (IE hardware where some >> RAM is really slow). > >No... it makes sense if you care about speed... and for the fact that even >if you have a Gig of RAM, you can't get rid of swap entirely without getting >mired in molasses. [I am told that the code for dealing with a swapless So you create a 1M partition for swap then. Using RAM as swap will not gain you anything. At best it won't be used and will just be a waste of memory that could otherwise be used for disk cache. At worst you will have programs being paged to it which means copying data to/from the memory area which wastes CPU time. With 64bit memory it will take 512 reads and 512 writes to copy a 4K page of memory. If the memory is 10ns then it'll be 10*1024 == 10240ns to copy the page. That's 4096 clock cycles on a modern CPU. >system is not real efficient.] Not that I've seen a laptop with a gig yet >- but we tend to have slower CPUs overall, and we're more interested in >making our expensive toy last longer, so maybe we would want all the speed >improvements we can get. Having slower CPUs also means that we need to conserve their power more too. That means not using swap-to-RAM, putting plenty of RAM in the system (so the CPU doesn't block on paging), and doing anything else reasonable to get effective use of CPU power. Currently I am using the Xserver-fbdev which can't take advantage of the co-processed features of my video card and wastes CPU power and energy. I plan to write a Neomagic FrameBuffer driver and then try and get the xserver-fbdev co-prossing patches going (they apparently work well on Power Macintosh). >In theory any slimline drive should fit, I just haven't considered opening >the case and doing that yet. What I would like to see is a laptop that supports multiple hard drives. RAID-1 on desktop features is starting to become common (it will become especially common when the Raidtools2 stuff gets into the mainstream kernel). I think that we need the same in laptops. Also for more serious use they should sell laptops with support for 4 hard drives to run RAID-10. >Mine is full at 96 Mb and if it were a little faster to hibernate it would >be perfect. > >I don't do enough on my laptop to use it up anyway, though I sometimes blow >past the original 32 Mb, so it was worth it to fill 'er up. When you move to a journalled file system you may feel the need for more RAM. Journalling does result in a larger working-set for the cache system... >> The latest Thinkpads can now handle more than 512M. Mine is only 3 weeks old >> and it's behind the times already! > >Keep chasing the bleeding edge, you'll fall off a cliff... :) I guess we'll >see Gigs of RAM soon enough then. I spend less money on laptops than most people spend on cars... -- Electronic information tampers with your soul.
