What benefit is an SD card on an XO-1? My tests of about 400 starts show some benefit of using an SD card, on activity startup time. The benefits are:
- boot time was decreased by several seconds; because of reduced demand for memory, - first activity start after boot was decreased by several seconds; because of reduced demand for memory, - when there is no contention for memory, mean cold activity startup time is decreased by between 1 and 2 seconds; because of both different data rates and no decompression, and; - writing journal entries is slightly faster. There was no benefit on activity startup time where caches were warm; everything needed by the activity was already in memory, so there was no extra wait. The SD card was a SanDisk Ultra 8GB, class 10, 30 MB/s. Sequential read speed on a modern desktop is 18.5 MB/s. But on the XO-1 the speed is 6.3 MB/s. There may be little advantage to using a faster card. For Sugar 0.104 comparing results by activity, between NAND flash and SD card: bundle_id cold warm std ratio tests com.garycmartin.Moon 11.928 10.294 0.492 0.863 24 com.garycmartin.Moon 11.809 10.585 0.516 0.896 24 sd com.jotaro.ImplodeActivity 9.084 9.017 0.498 0.993 24 com.jotaro.ImplodeActivity 9.560 8.904 0.501 0.931 24 sd org.laptop.AbiWordActivity 20.868 16.862 0.376 0.808 24 org.laptop.AbiWordActivity 19.326 16.441 0.277 0.851 24 sd org.laptop.AcousticMeasure 12.330 10.513 0.137 0.853 24 org.laptop.AcousticMeasure 11.854 10.552 0.254 0.890 24 sd org.laptop.Calculate 11.591 9.920 0.120 0.856 24 org.laptop.Calculate 12.152 9.975 0.205 0.821 24 sd org.laptop.HelpActivity 14.654 8.981 0.329 0.613 24 org.laptop.HelpActivity 13.025 9.027 0.345 0.693 24 sd org.laptop.MeasureActivity 16.381 11.364 0.135 0.694 24 org.laptop.MeasureActivity 15.000 11.634 0.344 0.776 24 sd org.laptop.Memorize 17.961 14.550 0.183 0.810 24 org.laptop.Memorize 16.442 14.724 0.240 0.896 24 sd org.laptop.Oficina 12.231 12.029 0.351 0.983 24 org.laptop.Oficina 13.250 12.270 0.585 0.926 24 sd org.laptop.Pippy 8.752 8.202 0.128 0.937 24 org.laptop.Pippy 9.897 8.404 0.467 0.849 24 sd org.laptop.RecordActivity 16.956 12.652 0.145 0.746 24 org.laptop.RecordActivity 15.341 12.501 0.255 0.815 24 sd org.laptop.sugar.Jukebox 9.666 8.986 0.108 0.930 24 org.laptop.sugar.Jukebox 9.821 9.287 0.472 0.946 24 sd org.laptop.sugar.ReadActivity 11.296 10.477 0.165 0.928 24 org.laptop.sugar.ReadActivity 11.080 10.618 0.463 0.958 24 sd org.laptop.TamTamMini 18.628 14.734 0.576 0.791 24 org.laptop.TamTamMini 19.838 14.615 0.288 0.737 24 sd org.laptop.WebActivity 19.425 12.527 0.217 0.645 24 org.laptop.WebActivity 17.935 12.937 0.274 0.721 24 sd tv.alterna.Clock 10.061 7.124 0.123 0.708 24 tv.alterna.Clock 21.226 7.522 0.316 0.354 24 sd ? vu.lux.olpc.Maze 8.366 8.265 0.120 0.988 24 vu.lux.olpc.Maze 8.998 8.646 0.370 0.961 24 sd vu.lux.olpc.Speak 24.555 12.075 0.208 0.492 24 ? vu.lux.olpc.Speak 16.526 11.946 0.358 0.723 24 sd The cold results for Clock and Speak are unexpected, but this may be related to gst-plugin-scan. (Reference: test #6, vs #10) -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel