Re: Alive?

On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 06:29 -0500, Damian Gerow wrote:
> I realize this is more of a dev list, but I've got a question: I recently
> got Linux booting on my GC, but I can't do much with the system, as it
> continuously runs out of memory, and starts killing processes.  Which, as it
> happens, are generally the processes I'm trying to run.

Two good techniques to increase available memory are to add swap
devices.

The first one permits swap to 'audio RAM'. In addition to its 24M of
system RAM the GameCube contains 16M that is normally used to hold audio
data buffers. The CPU cannot address the audio RAM directly so this
memory cannot be used like normal system memory but it is possible to
use the audio RAM as a swap device.

Create a device node:

mknod /dev/aram b 37 0

Add the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/aram       swap            swap    pri=32767       0       0

Note: pri=32767 ensures that the ARAM is the kernel's preferred swap
device, that is pages will be stored in ARAM in preference to other swap
devices such as via ethernet. At present there is no other hardware for
a GameCube that offers more performant swap device so giving it maximal
priority really does make sense.

Finally after each reboot (this could be integrated into the boot
scripts):

mkswap /dev/aram
swapon -a

The other technique is to swap to a network block device (NBD) but I
haven't any canned instructions for that so you'll have to google to
figure it out.

-- 
Daniel Thompson (Merlin) <[email protected]>
signature.asc? http://www.redfelineninja.dsl.pipex.com/signature.html

Did Sigmund's wife wear Freudian slips?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQBDa0u0rr8Ifkjg/MwRAqaeAJ4nef6gSwad+FA2NPBl63m0dmUzwwCfVn3A
8FkzRYPfSJJ8irHfNrZCUq8=
=Tz5A
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----