XO: Live and /tmp

[Nifty Fedora Mitch]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 09:52:58AM -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 14:39 -0700, Nifty Fedora Mitch wrote:
> > With the  F10-Snap1-i686-Live image I see
> > that /tmp is tmpfs which has negative impact on
> > RAM.   
> 
> Not having it on tmpfs has the same memory implications.  Remember that
> the "writable" area of the live image filesystem is handled by the
> device-mapper snapshot.  And writing to those blocks for /tmp has worse
> implications longer term
> 
> > Does it make sense to add a modest swap space partition
> > to the flash SD card and build the image to test
> > for and use it?
> 
> With Snap2, there's support for automatically enabling a swap file found
> at LiveOS/swap.img and livecd-iso-to-disk can take a --swap-size-mb
> argument (analagous to --home-size-mb)
> 

Thank you.....

I did try adding a swap partition and it helped a lot.
It turns out that there are some yum update %post actions
that can run the little XO out of space.  I cannot tell
if the error is a simple fork+exec that fails or if the child
realy runs things out of memory.


What I did....
Where sdXy is your selected device partition...
 sudo mkswap  -L XOSWAP /dev/sdXy

Once I added a large enough swap I was able to yum do a
full yum update on Snap1.  Without I was not able to.

I also found it helpful to set a "ulimit -v"
for yum as it wants to be large.

I have dedicated an older SD card to add swap and a scratch file system
for normal XO use -- I found I liked to have multiple terminal activities
and multiple browser windows and it appears to help.

Time for me to move to "Snap2".

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?