RE: [iPAQ] Wish List

Hello Carl;
> Jamey Hicks writes:
> >
> > Cross-compiling is often a headache.
> >
>
> Ain't that the truth. Then again, native compilation, (the ideal),
> hasn't been painless for me so far. Here's where I'm at:

:-)

>
> 1) I'm using a CF ethernet card and chroot to an NFS debian
> install as per the Debian/arm howto. Compilation works
> quite well in this environment until I run out of memory.
>
> 2) Since I keep running out of memory during big compiles I've
> tried to add some swap space. The swapon man pages say,
> "Swap over NFS may not work" and I'm beginning to agree
> there. If I do the mkswap from the iPAQ I always get
> "invalid swap file" from swapon. If I run mkswap from my
> NFS server, then the swapon succeeds, but I get periodic
> messages saying something like "rw_swap: invalid swap
> file", (can't remember the exact message) and processes
> start dying. Any hints from the skiffcluster maintainers
> about how I can get this to work?

We are using the loop back device, please look at /etc/inittab & /etc/fstab
on the skiffcluster. This helps but we still have problems. Ken Causey has
been making changes to /proc/sys/vm/freepages to make things work better,
but I do not have the results.

>
> 3) Since NFS over swap isn't too happy, I'm now installing a
> Debian image on a microdrive where I also made a swap
> partition. My microdrive is only 340MB so it takes a little
> more care to make sure everything fits. Also, I will no
> longer have access to the network during compilation so
> it's more painful to move files back and forth. :( Yes, the
> USB networking code will help out here... I can't wait! :).
>
> Any suggestions on how to get more robust native compilation?

Wait for USB to work then use nfs over USB and Microdrive swap; get a 1GB
Microdrive or 2GB Toshiba PCMCIA drive; wait for the Shark Pool; removed the
32MB DRAM chips and replace them with 64MB chips.

I know that the above solutions are not very useful to most people at this
time, but this will change.

Best Regards,

--George
Received on Wed Oct 11 10:21:20 2000