Ext4 hacker Ted Ts'o converts his laptop

Posted Jul 1, 2008 9:11 UTC (Tue) by Zorggy (guest, #51397)
In reply to: Ext4 hacker Ted Ts'o converts his laptop by Camarade_Tux
Parent article: Ext4 hacker Ted Ts'o converts his laptop

Of course I did not explained that SSD would replace disks next year, but it is a fast
evolving technology. The example you show is a bit biased as the EeePC is a very low-cost
computer, not integrating the cutting-edge technology, far more expensive.

But you are right, there are some limiting constraints that must be taken into account when
using a file-system. There are some specialized ones such as JFFS2, YAFFS, LogFS or UBIFS
which are far better when managing SSD compared to EXTx, specialized in rotating disks.

And about the consumption, I can read from the article you provided: "we received confirmation
from two vendors that many flash devices dont feature power saving mechanisms yet". That
could be a path for huge improvements in a near future.

Ext4 hacker Ted Ts'o converts his laptop

Posted Jul 2, 2008 18:19 UTC (Wed) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link] (1 responses)

Regarding JFFS2, it scales *very* badly.  I think OLPC has done some work 
for it to be usable with 1/2GB partition sizes, but basically JFFS2 is 
obsolete technology with today's disk sizes.

I've heard that the larger SSD disks might support less write-cycles 
(there's more space over which to spread the writes so it could be less of 
an issue for normal desktop users), any idea whether this is true?

Swap is one use-case for disk with which SSD doesn't deal that well, I 
guess computers of future still need swap...

Ext4 hacker Ted Ts'o converts his laptop

Posted Jul 2, 2008 19:00 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Swap is one use-case for disk with which SSD doesn't deal that well, I guess computers of future still need swap...

Uh, probably not. Why bother swapping to an expensive medium when swap does not need to be persistent, just add more RAM. You could even devise slower RAM based non persistent drives if you were worried about cost. Swap should die if spinning disks die. The whole point of swap is that in theory it is cheaper than RAM, not that is is persistent. Makes me wonder why no one is building a cheap non persistent "swap" drive yet, do they?