i had Jetpackrom+sempahore 1.6 on my phone and just downlaoded CF's tweaks and currently i'm on RFS ,is it safe to convert it into ext4??
I had read some where that ext4 or some other filesystem damages our nand flash , which one's better if its safe?
They are all safe.
They all work differently and give different results.
Ext 4 is most common.. The only risk involved, Is flashing without disabling it / converting it back to RFS.
That can cause issues, Whereas Flashing with RFS wont give any troubles.
Creates a VIRTUAL EXT2 filesystem inside the stock RFS filesystem on the internal SD card, with a 4KB block size. This means that this lag fix creates a buffer between the real filesystem and the android system. This buffer should reduce the amount of disk I/O required for all operations by utilizing EXT2 buffering, as well as not writing file access times to disk, etc. It allows only 1GB for application data at this stage, down from the 2GB of application data when running stock.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There was a really useful thread on here a while back explaining in great detail how lagfixes actually work.
I cant seem to find it tho, Perhaps some one else may point you in the right direction,
(that above i just copied and pasted from google, it may not be much use, but there is not a lot of sites explaining it properly.... its confusing, even for me )
azzledazzle said:
They are all safe.
They all work differently and give different results.
Ext 4 is most common.. The only risk involved, Is flashing without disabling it / converting it back to RFS.
That can cause issues, Whereas Flashing with RFS wont give any troubles.
There was a really useful thread on here a while back explaining in great detail how lagfixes actually work.
I cant seem to find it tho, Perhaps some one else may point you in the right direction,
(that above i just copied and pasted from google, it may not be much use, but there is not a lot of sites explaining it properly.... its confusing, even for me )
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That was good!
but i also wanna get a look on that thread about the lagfixes and filesystems!!
OK, so ive been searching for ages for the File-system / Lag-fix thread. But I still cannot find it lol, Its really annoying me now. I hope someone finds it for me. (unless its been deleted ???? )
Anyway upon my search for this missing masterpiece, I came across these, They may help you learn a little more about how the whole lag fix works, They may not. Who knows ?
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=765822
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1178788
I think ext4 is better in many aspects....great speed feel the difference.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
ali_khalid5518 said:
I think ext4 is better in many aspects....great speed feel the difference.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you carefully read the topics here regarding the file systems ext4 and RFS you'll find, that there is no measurable difference in the latest GB ROMs anymore.
However, ext4 is by far the more modern and sophisticated file system and it's completely open source, while RFS is based on rather old fashioned and simple FAT and Samsung keeps the source closed AFAIK.
Best solution would be btrfs, but this is not regarded stable in Linux kernel. IMO the best file system so far is XFS: rock solid, stable and performing rather well even on small files. However reiserfs is much better in this aspect, but it's not further developed.
These are just my thoughts with my experience from many different Linux devices like the Openmoko freerunner for example....
Related
Ok so i am running Cyan's 3.6.8.1 currently. I was running the newest 7 up untill this morning. And i woke up and booted my phone and had extreme lag. Restarted, had some bad lag still. I checked my swap and it said 0 across the board. I cant remember checking it with a fresh install. So my question is:
Does swap partition work with the most recent cyanogens? Also i keep seeing stuff pop up about compcache, ive read the tutorial but it looks like there isnt a recent userinit.sh for the newest cyan rom. How much faster is compcache if any over the swap partition?
I may be wrong but ithink the difference is one is dumped on sdcard (swap) and the other internally (compcache). Thaty means a slower sd card would result in slower read/write times. Also giving more wear on the sd. The userinit posted should be fine with cyanogens newest, however swappiness seems to be set a little high (60) that is a endless debate for the perfect setting. Mine is set to 10 though.
I have been reading some conflicting posts over which is better (linux swap vs compcache). Having used compcache for a week now, I am not happy with it--my swappiness was originally set at 60 and is now at 20. Some are saying that the linux swap allows their phones to operate very quickly and smoothly, which is unfortunately not the case with my phone. Add the confusion that there is a solution involving compcache with a backing swap file, and things look really complicated.
Also, I actually saw a poster claiming that NO SWAP worked better than having a swap at all. If anyone has some real data, please tell us: 1) whether swap increases phone performance (and how), and 2) which swap (linux, compcache, or compcache with backing swap) is better.
Thanks!
derfolo said:
I have been reading some conflicting posts over which is better (linux swap vs compcache). Having used compcache for a week now, I am not happy with it--my swappiness was originally set at 60 and is now at 20. Some are saying that the linux swap allows their phones to operate very quickly and smoothly, which is unfortunately not the case with my phone. Add the confusion that there is a solution involving compcache with a backing swap file, and things look really complicated.
Also, I actually saw a poster claiming that NO SWAP worked better than having a swap at all. If anyone has some real data, please tell us: 1) whether swap increases phone performance (and how), and 2) which swap (linux, compcache, or compcache with backing swap) is better.
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Compcache with backing swap uses both compcache and the linux swap partition (or a regular swap file). Because this uses both methods, this would be fastest. Its actually made the JACHero ROMs ridiculously usable (compared to before anyways...). The swappiness doesn't matter, it just determines how often android will use compcache or linux-swap. It differs from build to build, each build will have an optimal setting.
Linux-swap is faster than regular swap file.
I don't have any data, but testimonial(ly?) when I use JACHero with vs without compcache and linux-swap is like night and day. Without it, the phone is unusable, with it, the phone is very much improved.
Kind of off topic, but how do i change the size of the compcache file?
cronin4392 said:
Kind of off topic, but how do i change the size of the compcache file?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Edit the userinit.sh file you're using. Check the proper threads for compcache in development forums.
As far as Compcache vs swap, I've gone back to no swaps, it seems snappier by itself without these methods. It could be a personal preference though depending on what apps/services you use the most.
I did a search but couldn't find anything specific... so my question is, should I upgrade my ext3 to ext4? if so why? if not.. also why
gmelchert said:
I did a search but couldn't find anything specific... so my question is, should I upgrade my ext3 to ext4? if so why? if not.. also why
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No. Most (all?) of the new 2.1 test build leak based ROMs do no support a2sd on ext4. On (most of) these same builds ext3 works automatically.
danknee said:
No. Most (all?) of the new 2.1 test build leak based ROMs do no support a2sd on ext4. On these same builds ext3 works automatically.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
thanks thats good to know!
I know most of you are not Linux users so let me break this down for you:
EXT2: Very basic filesystem when it comes down to it -- think of it as a Unix filesystem you could place inbetween the likes of FAT32 and NTFS. I would nearly argue that this is the modern equivalent of FAT32 (which really really needs to die). We really shouldn't be using FAT32 but lack of native windows compatibility stops EXT2 from being a candidate for this usage.
EXT2 is highly recommended for your flash card. It won't over stress it and there aren't many alternatives that are better these days unless you're dealing with raw flash, which you'd then use something like YAFFS2 or JFFS2. The flash in compact flash cards is not raw flash.
EXT3: Picture EXT2 with a journal. It is backwards compatible with EXT2 (just doesn't read the journal).
A journal is NOT recommended for flash devices. (At least when the filesystem was not designed for raw flash and isn't tuned properly like YAFFS2 and JFFS2). Do you really want your phone to write all the metadata to the journal first and then to the filesystem? That's a ton of unnecessary I/O. If it has full journaling enabled you're writing all your data twice. This is not a good idea for your phone. This is one reason why NTFS has not become a standard for flash devices: Journals on flash are bad unless it's designed for flash from the ground up.
EXT4: same as EXT3 but is a copy-on-write FS with delayed allocation (holds data in memory longer before writing to disk to be more efficient / prevent fragmentation), increased number of files and size of files (more than a phone ever could need in our lifetime), etc. Some improvements across the board but not backwards compatible with EXT3 anymore if you're using the delayed allocation. Most likely to eat more memory on your phone.
This is completely unnecessary for a phone and really does not fit your needs. I don't understand why anyone would attempt to use this unless they simply thought "4 is bigger than 2 or 3 so it must be better!"
So there you have it. I may have forgotten a minor detail here or there, but this is the gist of it.
feld said:
I know most of you are not Linux users so let me break this down for you:
EXT2: Very basic filesystem when it comes down to it -- think of it as a Unix filesystem you could place inbetween the likes of FAT32 and NTFS. I would nearly argue that this is the modern equivalent of FAT32 (which really really needs to die). We really shouldn't be using FAT32 but lack of native windows compatibility stops EXT2 from being a candidate for this usage.
EXT2 is highly recommended for your flash card. It won't over stress it and there aren't many alternatives that are better these days unless you're dealing with raw flash, which you'd then use something like YAFFS2 or JFFS2. The flash in compact flash cards is not raw flash.
EXT3: Picture EXT2 with a journal. It is backwards compatible with EXT2 (just doesn't read the journal).
A journal is NOT recommended for flash devices. Do you really want your phone to write all the metadata to the journal first and then to the filesystem? That's a ton of unnecessary I/O. If it has full journaling enabled you're writing all your data twice. This is not a good idea for your phone. This is one reason why NTFS has not become a standard for flash devices.
EXT4: same as EXT3 but includes is a copy-on-write FS with delayed allocation (holds data in memory longer before writing to disk to be more efficient / prevent fragmentation), increased number of files and size of files (more than a phone ever could need in our lifetime), etc. Some improvements across the board but not backwards compatible with EXT3 anymore if you're using the delayed allocation.
This is completely unnecessary for a phone and really does not fit your needs. I don't understand why anyone would attempt to use this unless they simply thought "4 is bigger than 2 or 3 so it must be better!"
So there you have it. I may have forgotten a minor detail here or there, but this is the gist of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Nice explanation.
You left out the part about how apps load faster from RAM then they do from any sd card. The people running slower sd cards especially may potentially be experiencing a performance decrease due to a2sd.
I have abandoned a2sd because after I load every app that I use, (plus 10 random ones) I still have room left. Then I use the extra half a gig on my sd card for another 5 cds worth of music.
feld said:
I know most of you are not Linux users so let me break this down for you:
EXT2: Very basic filesystem when it comes down to it -- think of it as a Unix filesystem you could place inbetween the likes of FAT32 and NTFS. I would nearly argue that this is the modern equivalent of FAT32 (which really really needs to die). We really shouldn't be using FAT32 but lack of native windows compatibility stops EXT2 from being a candidate for this usage.
EXT2 is highly recommended for your flash card. It won't over stress it and there aren't many alternatives that are better these days unless you're dealing with raw flash, which you'd then use something like YAFFS2 or JFFS2. The flash in compact flash cards is not raw flash.
EXT3: Picture EXT2 with a journal. It is backwards compatible with EXT2 (just doesn't read the journal).
A journal is NOT recommended for flash devices. (At least when the filesystem was not designed for raw flash and isn't tuned properly like YAFFS2 and JFFS2). Do you really want your phone to write all the metadata to the journal first and then to the filesystem? That's a ton of unnecessary I/O. If it has full journaling enabled you're writing all your data twice. This is not a good idea for your phone. This is one reason why NTFS has not become a standard for flash devices: Journals on flash are bad unless it's designed for flash from the ground up.
EXT4: same as EXT3 but is a copy-on-write FS with delayed allocation (holds data in memory longer before writing to disk to be more efficient / prevent fragmentation), increased number of files and size of files (more than a phone ever could need in our lifetime), etc. Some improvements across the board but not backwards compatible with EXT3 anymore if you're using the delayed allocation. Most likely to eat more memory on your phone.
This is completely unnecessary for a phone and really does not fit your needs. I don't understand why anyone would attempt to use this unless they simply thought "4 is bigger than 2 or 3 so it must be better!"
So there you have it. I may have forgotten a minor detail here or there, but this is the gist of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had never thought about this before. It makes a good point, flash memory dies after x ammount of Reads and Writes. Given it's mostly in the 100 millions, but it does more reading and writing than you would think it does, and you are effectivly killing the memory card twice as fast.
Good thing these things are relativly cheap.
this is all really good to know. thanks. i spent $100 on my sd card so maybe i should just foemat the whole thing to fat32.. (its class 10) while you guys are here, what exactly is the use of swap?
Sent from my HERO200 using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
gmelchert said:
this is all really good to know. thanks. i spent $100 on my sd card so maybe i should just foemat the whole thing to fat32.. (its class 10) while you guys are here, what exactly is the use of swap?
Sent from my HERO200 using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
SWAP = Page file in the Linux world. From what I have read (This may have changed since then) We don't have the ability to use Swap yet.
danknee said:
You left out the part about how apps load faster from RAM then they do from any sd card. The people running slower sd cards especially may potentially be experiencing a performance decrease due to a2sd.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're right -- apps do load faster from RAM. However, when you're not using a2sd the applications are not on the phone in "RAM". They're in a flash chip inside the phone -- just like on your sd card. The performance should be nearly the same when you're using a2sd as it is when you're not using it.
The only reasons why a2sd should be slower are:
1) You have a cheap, slow SD card
2) The interface from the SD card to the phone is cheap and slower than the internal flash chip's interface. It was just a cheap design choice the manufacturer made.
3) The internal flash is simply faster from it being a better flash chip
feld is right. Using anything other than ext2 for the apps2sd partition boggles the mind. I have no idea why people insist on a: providing support for it and b: encouraging people to do it.
Ok, provide support for it for the people who know what they're doing/just want to do it for the hell of it, but having a journalled filesystem on an sd card makes no sense whatsoever.
As feld says ext4 uses up more RAM than ext2, which might be all well and good for things like the N1/Evo/Desire etc but not everyone has such a RAM beefy phone.
Besides that, the bottle neck in speed is the SD card/controller. No "faster filesystem" is going to improve that. Adding more IO is only going to slow things down.
Moved as not Android Development.
Dear all,
first of all I wish to thank everyone in XDA that with his contribution helps us to make our devices blazing fast and really snappy.
Since I installed JPY firmware and I backed up every application I had the warning "Database almost full, please delete messages, contacts etc..." and in fact I have only 20Mb free.
I saw that Samsung to perform this big improvement in the software moved some application data in dbdata partition that is formatted to have only 128Mb!!
The problem is that at moment the maximum number of installable applications is limited due to dbdata space and this could be a big problem.
In other posts I read that other people had my same problem but no possible solution to fix it has been find out.
Is there any chance to fix this limitation?
Thank you for your awesome support
paky79 said:
Dear all,
first of all I wish to thank everyone in XDA that with his contribution helps us to make our devices blazing fast and really snappy.
Since I installed JPY firmware and I backed up every application I had the warning "Database almost full, please delete messages, contacts etc..." and in fact I have only 20Mb free.
I saw that Samsung to perform this big improvement in the software moved some application data in dbdata partition that is formatted to have only 128Mb!!
The problem is that at moment the maximum number of installable applications is limited due to dbdata space and this could be a big problem.
In other posts I read that other people had my same problem but no possible solution to fix it has been find out.
Is there any chance to fix this limitation?
Thank you for your awesome support
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
yes, it can be fixed by:
1/. remove/relocate the files under /dbdata
2/. disable the disk full warning (it will show u the prompt if the free space is under a certain percentage)
I still have over 90 MB left. Just how many apps do you have? 100+?
I have ca 80 applications.
Is it safe to move the app data from dbdata? If yes, where do I move the data?
80 applications!?! you a collector?
Any solutions
I've had the problem also till recently when I installed Darky's 9.0 and did a wipe for the sake of cleanness.
I am sure I'm going to encounter it again and I would gladly take some measures now when i have the time to do it before I am constrained by it.
At a rough search I did find some info about it, some even here on XDA, but nobody had a definitive solution.
Is there a way to increase this partition size or keep some info stored there in another place ?
Is there an app that will tend to put big chunks of data there, more than usual?
Hope somebody with better kung fu than us drops by and enlightens us
Every Smartphone has limited space. Every Computer has limited space.
Everything has limited space.
It's a smartphone, not a huge trash container where you can put everything you find at market into.
Only install apps which you are using often and not apps which you're using once a year.
segun_aduba said:
I've had the problem also till recently when I installed Darky's 9.0 and did a wipe for the sake of cleanness.
I am sure I'm going to encounter it again and I would gladly take some measures now when i have the time to do it before I am constrained by it.
At a rough search I did find some info about it, some even here on XDA, but nobody had a definitive solution.
Is there a way to increase this partition size or keep some info stored there in another place ?
Is there an app that will tend to put big chunks of data there, more than usual?
Hope somebody with better kung fu than us drops by and enlightens us
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There was a discussion in the cache bug thread about increasing partition size. No one knows for sure because none of these problems popped up until quite recently. Cache is even more troublesome since it means we might not be able to download apps in the future.
But your usage is still unusual. I would suggest going through the app manager and see if any app is hogging up data.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
I also have this problem, using right now 45mb of 96mb, that is with only 44 downloaded apps installed...
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App
I have 109 apps installed and have 105mb free in dbdata, go figure.
peachpuff said:
I have 109 apps installed and have 105mb free in dbdata, go figure.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Do you have lagfix activated? Are you on 2.2.1 version?
I may be talking rubbish here, but shouldn't it be possible to move some of the folders to another partition and symlink them? This is Linux after all...
I'd try something like:
(THIS HAS NOT BEEN TESTED AND IT MIGHT BREAK SOMETHING)
- Move some of the biggest folders from /dbdata to another partition (if you're lagfixed and care about speed, you should move them to another partition with ext4 or whatever your lagfix uses). In a terminal emulator you could move them with:
mkdir /data/dbdata2; mv /dbdata/databases/com.whatever /data/dbdata2
- After moving them you should be able to symlink them with something like:
ln /data/dbdata2/com.whatever /dbdata/databases/com.whatever
Like I said, this isn't tested and might awfully break something (I'd do a backup and try with non-system programs first), but I'd guess it's worth a try if you really want to have more dbdata space.
EDIT: I just noticed that /system has limited space too, so you'd be better of moving them do /data, which seems to be the biggest partition on the SGS.
If anyone is interested I could try and create a shell script that would move all of the stuff from /dbdata to /data/dbdata and replace the stuff with symlinks automatically. Let me know...
throughout the time ive spent with my captivate i have seen more people saying they are having issues with this /datadata folder getting too full on the root of the cappy when running cm7 than anything else (except BLN but thats not a true issue as much as a feature request of many) and i was wondering if there was any way i could increase the size of /datadata? is there any way we could rally together and get the size increased by the cm team themselves? if this /datadata folder getting low on space hadnt caused most of the problems i have read of people encountering with cm7 i wouldnt have made this thread.
but basically what im talking about is this:
1. new cm7 user installs the rom
2. they comment about how awesome and smooth it runs and how its better than anything, and "how could i have waited so long for this" type statements
3. they install all their user apps, generally not even close to enough to fill up the phone's "internal storage"
4. they come to the cm7 nightly or rc threads and make a post about force closes, lag, performance complaints, market download issues, or whatever random problem the tiny /datadata folder has caused them to experience
5. 1-4 people tell them about the /datadata folder needing more room to wiggle in and everything is fine after that
if there was some way to increase this mysterious (and entirely too small) /datadata folder's size then we could stop the steps above at 3, and to my knowledge the system doesnt act the same way on samsung roms, therefore a developer for samsung knows how to make the /datadata location work differently, or better in some way. if there is a partition specifically for that folder then i would like to know how to make it larger without screwing up the rest of the phone (i.e. making caches too small can cause market issues and such nonsense)
does anybody else have any information to add to this? if so please let me know to update the OP because i would enjoy how clean the threads will be, how well cyanogen will work out of the box, and not having to relay the same information repeatedly because some just simply will not use the search function to find one of the dozens of users experiencing the same problems in the threads they are posting in.
I know there has to be some way because no other phone i have used has acted this way, and no other rom, thus it is a 100% fixable and do-able thing. if anybody can do it its those here on xda so i figured i would post this to try and get the development needed for the fix going strong.
I know very little about these things honestly, but i do know some and i shall contribute as much as i can
Shame, shame. You know better than posting something for Q&A in Development.
This sounds like something a bounty should be started for.
Sent from something from somewhere
Shell Script?
Would it be possible to create some kind of script that can run periodicly that can empty the /datadata folder?
n0r4d said:
Would it be possible to create some kind of script that can run periodicly that can empty the /datadata folder?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can format datadata from CWM in recovery mode, so maybe tell the CM7 kernel to format it on startup... Just a thought.
Hello there! now that we have custom kernel, I want to share with you this Little trick I used in my old Motorola z6 when I used to develop xD
Due to the fact that memory cards have sometimes low data transfer rates, swapping on our devices sometimes is a Little bit slow... to solve the issue, I used to place a swapfile in the internal storage of the phone, wich has pretty fast data transfer rates... so I did this once again with my milestone, and the peformance is amazing!! I'm currently using CM7.2.4 with a 48mb swapfile placed inside /data...
Just wanted to share this with all the people of this community, I also modded the script written by FuFu, so the script insted of creating the swapfile in the sd-card, it creates it in /data
I won't post the modded script because I want FuFu himself to decide if the mod is OK, and make his own reléase! Just a matter of respect...
So that's it, try it out people, you're gonna be amazed....
no Problem, you can post your modded script here
i also tryed to use a swapfile on /data, but for me it wont work, if i try to use swapon on /data it sayes:
invalide argument
but i will take a look at your modded script and also i will include it in future updates
i think it may be very interesting for all users to get some extra performance
I'm not sure it is as good idea as it sounds first.
Memories based on flash technology are degrading when writing on it. (I know they are degrading anyway.)
Swapping means a lot of writing and reading and while you can easily buy a new SD-Card you cannot change your phone's internal memory.
Maybe my fears are baseless, but i don't wanna risk.
May someone with better knowledge correct me.
Plus, it is not possible to enable swap on yaffs filesystem "out-of-the-box" as they are incompatible.
I have CM7.2.4 now and three primary partitions on SD Card: Fat32, Ext2 and Linux Swap.
I installed 98swaponv5 after CM7.2.4 rom with OpenRecovery. Does 98swaponv5 have some settings or how I can know it's working?
Well it seems that I can multitask and change from Facebook to other apps and back and it doesn't reload, so I guess the swap is working.
But the default browser always reloads the page when I switch to the browser. Looks like all the other apps work great with the swap except the browser, I wonder why?
EDIT: Right now the browser doesn't reload anymore when I switch to it. I have rebooted and installed some apps, killed some apps. Looks like the Milestone just keeps getting better.
If you have Terminal Emulator installed, you can type free and it will show you the amount of total/used/free memory and in the row "Swap" the informations about swap.