Planet maemo: category "feed:6af7b3f8d9e1c036761a1cdf0db0b428"

vjaquez

Moving out apt metadata

2010-01-12 10:19 UTC  by  vjaquez
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As some of you may know, in the N900, the root file system is stored in a OneNAND chip with 256M of space. Meanwhile /home and /home/user/MyDocs are in a eMMC in two different partitions: ~2GB (ext2) for /home and ~29GB (vfat) for /home/user/MyDocs.

The OneNAND is faster than the eMMC, and it’s intended to host only the Maemo main system, moving out the third party applications to the eMMC. Though, this new layout has brought new limitations, the more visible one is the /opt problem [2].

One of the debates about what left and what not in the OneNAND is the apt’s database and metadata. Moving out the apt’s database out from the OneNAND to the eMMC, in my personal opinion, is very risky: It will slow down the database processing (which is already slow given the size of the Fremantle repositories), and if the eMMC gets corrupted, the base system wouldn’t be upgreadable either, because apt couldn’t read its database. And that’s why I’m against the proposal.

Nevertheless I’m aware that the apt’s metadata and database could be huge, consuming much of the precious OpenNAND storing space. Just to mention it,  I’ve found myself, in my development cycles, moving out those files.

That’s why I cooked this script: move-apt-dirs.sh

WARNING: this script is not official. You’re at your own if you run it: no promises, no guaranties.

Categories: Planet Igalia
vjaquez

shinning new HAM

2009-12-14 11:07 UTC  by  vjaquez
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A new version HAM will hit the streets soon, and we, the HAM team, are very proud of all the effort done.

There have been 178 commits since the first public release in the HAM repository, all of them affording user experience and trying to cover several corner cases on the SSU realm, specially dealing with reduced disk space in the OneNAND.

New section view in HAM

New section view in HAM

There are several new features and some eye candy:

  1. The section view has been improved greatly GtkIconView instead of the old buttons grid.
  2. Several user interaction (work flows and dialogs appearance) optimizations.
  3. Keep the cursor position in the package lists among operations.
  4. Add live search support, dropping the old search dialog.
  5. Avoid the update icon blink when the screen is blank, saving power
  6. maemo-confirm-text can show the package name who launched it.
  7. Minor fixes in logic strings and text display.
  8. Speed up the HAM launching loading the back-end using a lazy strategy.
  9. Speed up the package list processing in the back-end, so the package list are shown more quickly in the UI.

For the packagers there are also some bits:

  1. Adapt the .install files in order to interact with the packaged catalogs.
  2. Initial support for OVI store packages.
  3. Add a dbus function to search packages so other applications can interact with HAM.

And for the SSU, specially handling the reduced space disk in the root file system:

  1. Use always the eMMC for downloaded packages, avoiding the rootfs even as fallback.
  2. Stop as much process as possible when going into the SSU (stop prestarted apps, camera-ui, browser, rtcom-messaging-ui, alarmd, etc.) in order to reduce the double mappings of large files.
  3. Go into rescue mode if the SSU fails and change its looks to a less scary one.
  4. Sync the disk before fetching it status, moving the operation to the back-end.
  5. Because the documentation use a lot of disk space, we hack a way to get rid of it during the SSU.
  6. Use the higher disk compression during the SSU

Special thanks to Lokesh, David Kedves, Mario, Marius, Gabriel,  and all whom patient had helped us to make HAM a better piece of software to Fremantle users.

Categories: Planet Igalia
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