Re: Freenet on Embedded Systems

Matthew John Toseland <[email protected]> Sun, 3 Sep 2017 18:36:57 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.network.freenet.devel
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 23/08/17 19:57, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I think such a device would be awesome! If combined with the icicles
> app, it could make using darknet very convenient.
> 
> This could also serve as darknet peer to a node which runs on another
> computer.

Agreed! For any sort of darknet to be viable, we need it to be easy to
run full-time nodes.

Moving most of the duties of WoT to a separate device, e.g. your laptop,
is an interesting idea.
> 
> Steve Dougherty <steve-kVTqj8yhOEv2eFz/[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> To run Freenet it'd need robust storage and a fair amount of RAM; when
>> I ran a Freenet node on a Raspberry Pi 2 (1 GiB RAM; MicroSD card
>> rootfs and USB ports) with Freenet installed to a USB hard drive, the
>> USB drive kept disconnecting (maybe due to flakiness under load?),
>> causing filesystem corruption and kernel panics. When I moved the
>> Freenet installation to the MicroSD card, not long after the
>> filesystem started to, if memory serves, refuse to accept writes.
> 
> Since this is a problem we’ve seen in the past, and since this will be
> an always-on device (many¹ USB hard drives have problems with sustained
> load, and many¹ SD cards aren’t built for constaint rewriting), I’d
> suggest using 512 MiB of pure ram-storage. Then we could guarantee that
> freenet would not create strain on the device.

Ugh. Say goodbye to data persistence.

There ought to be a solution to this. Even if it means finding a
manufacturing partner. Pi's aren't known for their stability in the
first place. Also, it would be perfectly reasonable to implement
software workarounds for these sorts of things... of course that means
the network has to deal with the flakiness...
> 
> ¹: It doesn’t matter that there are ones which work well if we cannot
>    guarantee that users will have one which works well.

Which is why we'd need to find one and ship it.

But yes, most hard drives, USB or not, aren't engineered to run
constantly. However it is easy to obtain drives that *can* run
constantly. They just cost a bit more. And tend not to have a USB interface.
> 
>> So whatever this does use it'll need good storage one way or
>> another. I had some flavor of https://nextthing.co/pages/chip in mind,
>> but haven't tested running Freenet on such a system yet. Either way it
>> couldn't handle something memory-heavy like Sone, and maybe not WoT
>> either. (For reference my Freenet node with both of those is currently
>> sitting at about 2 GiB resident.) Hopefully a base node would work.
> 
> My base nodes without WoT work well with roughly 500MiB of memory and
> just about 10% load (on a 2x800MHz system).

Yeah, on plausible home connections Freenet could reasonably run on a Pi
(at least in RAM and CPU terms), although we might have issues with JITs.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Arne
>
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