The Ubuntu community has contributed 15752 ideas, 77802 comments, 1421719 votes
Idea
#2701: Add automated page fire creation (swap) to a usb flash drive.
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-36
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Written by tomatz the 3 Mar 08 at 11:36.
Category: System.
Related to:
Nothing/Others.
Status: New
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Description
Add automated page fire creation (r-click) option when a usb flash drive is mounted. This would be great for laptops (and desktops) low on physical memory (512MB or less) as usb flash seek time is only 2ms which makes it much faster than a traditional page file/swap partition. I have implemented this myself on my eeepc and it defiantly gives you a performance boost but its quite messy having to create "swapon" scripts and whatnot. This is already implemented in vista in the form of readyboost ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost)
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Comments
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Auzy wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 12:03
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I agree.
However, the speed of readyboost has been questioned, and only been found to be effective when there isn't much ram, in which case, you are still better off buying more ram.
So for that reason, it's nice to play catchup with Windows.
One security consideration though is requiring root to do so (which is what you need anyway). Otherwise its possible to read other peoples memory.
I'm voting +1 because it should be added (flash drives aren't that expensive, and may help when you cant easily get ram) to play catchup.
The code is mostly in place too, its just a matter of detecting when a USB stick has been plugged in, and prompting the user (or just offering a control panel, which is easier).
The user must be warned too not to pull it out, or for obvious reasons bad stuff WILL happen.
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Auzy wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 12:06
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And whoa, that made no sense..
Translation:
+ Windows has got it, we should too
+ Most the code is in place, or is easily added
+ Its an easy way of speeding up older PC's when you dont want to pull them open, or they dont have enough slots
- The speedup is limited only to computers with little ram. So maybe we should only enable the popup by default if ubuntu is installed via the minimal installer.
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tomatz wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 12:12
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Thanks:) In regards to detecting the flash drive I think this could easily be implemented in the form of a (small) daemon That watches for flash drives to be mounted and also watches for a generically named page file to mount as swap. I think the page file would be a better option (as opposed to a swap partition) because this would enable you to still store files on the flash drive without the need for partitioning.
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pturing wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 16:11
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Any option to do this should be buried somewhere - it's not something people should be encouraged to do.
First, when the usb stick gets yanked out, terrible things will happen.
Also, writing to a usb stick a lot will Kill your usb stick, which means now you have memory errors, and a bad usb stick.
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tomatz wrote on the 3 Mar 08 at 16:46
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...when the usb stick gets yanked out, terrible things will happen.....
True
...Also, writing to a usb stick a lot will Kill your usb stick, which means now you have memory errors, and a bad usb stick.
Misconception
Flash drives are cheap and a fairly good quality one will last for at least 2-3 years using it this way (of course you will have to lower the swappiness).
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Mr.elderman wrote on the 21 Jul 08 at 03:44
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I think the kernel should be patched to support page faults form the usb card in order to recover from situtions like that (people may forget the card is being used as swap).
Not impossible really. Just a matter of sending a signal warning the user to put the flash memory back with the option to stop the operations there consequently migrating to the HDD.
Some operations should also be aware of that, ie.: CD/DVD recording.
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RaVeR VaNc3 wrote on the 9 Aug 08 at 11:22
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this idea would be great considering i have seen how well it amazingly does work on vista
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