Assuming OLPC isn't using TRIM support on the SD cards, writes to the swap space are indistinguishable from writes to any other space on the card. That means that writes to the swap "partition" could potentially corrupt other data on the card, especially if it occurs less than 30s before removal of power (or whatever that evil keepout time is).
>From my recent experience, I wouldn't be too worried about swap space "wearing out" the SD card, as we used to -- but that's not to say it's 100% safe, all reads and writes are risky to some degree. We've seen up to 60s delays on reads from flash as well, you might consider how that might affect perceived performance. FWIW, litl also uses a no-swap-space linux setup. We haven't actually had any problems with it; bugs I thought I could pin on low-memory/no-swap issues turned out to actually be bugs in the Atom page table hardware (!) which were exacerbated when lots of page table operations were done -- in our case, GPU-heavy tasks triggered the bug just as well. Our superstitions about OLPC's no-swap configuration may well prove to be similarly unfounded. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel