just a thought (bring us light) - G1 Android Development

me and my friend where talking about useing the sd card as a additional RAM or a source of temp memeory like a pagefile/swap file. is it possable at all? JF i know your man and possibly thought of this. if this can be done apps would be bigger and better!

I am nearly positive it couldn't be used as a ram extension at all, and it really is pointless to use it as a temp memory, since the internal phone memory transfers at nearly the same speed as the sd card, unless it's class 6 or class 8.
Sorry to bring your hopes down.

just create a linux swap partition on the SDcard, and use mount to mount it. boom, instant virtual memory, really do not see why it wouldnt work.
However, it IS a bad idea, as it will be DOG slow going out to the SDCARD, i mean, HD swap is already terrible (you feel it when you start swapping out), so I would say not a great idea.

I think the next big thing smartphones will support is hardrive and ram upgrades. That would be so piff... imagine iff u can keep updating you smartphone internaly to keep up with the times? I.e= " yes sir 3g is not supported on your phone, but if u want to buy the 3g mini-pci (lol) adapter u can 3g away 2day " lmao, I wud have a stain in my pants if I herd that sentence

Related

Running RAM from the SDCard... is it possible?

I did a search but I only have a phone to do this from so hopefully I didn't miss it.
Is it possible to make ram run off of the SDCard in a new partition (or even a current partition) simalar to Readyboost for vista? With all these home screen apps taking up so much RAM is would be helpful.
I am what you would call an advanced noob at this so don't flame me if I'm totally off.
I don't believe android supports something like this, this is sort of like Virtual Memory in Windows. However, the effectiveness of this isn't very good, moreover, the speed of the SD card or even support for this feature is... unknown. So, for now, I'm going to have to say I don't think so.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=483110&highlight=swap
Yeah, it's in the market now too. I haven't tried it out though, I don't want to make my microSD card last even less now... =P
axion68 said:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=483110&highlight=swap
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Thank you for that.
amgupt01 said:
Yeah, it's in the market now too. I haven't tried it out though, I don't want to make my microSD card last even less now... =P
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Any idea how much less?
mmafighter077 said:
Any idea how much less?
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Linux swap partitions aren't designed for flash memory like Readyboost is. Microsoft says Readyboost is designed to make your memory last at least 10 years with moderate use, but Linux swap might stress it more. MicroSDs are really cheap though.
nm page didn't load right, i thought i was the first post with useful info.
mmafighter077 said:
Any idea how much less?
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Click to collapse
It should still last you years.
Each sector on flash media can be written to something like 10,000 times. After that's worn out, I believe it just ignores that sector. Meaning when your mem stick starts dying, you'll just have less space available to you.
I currently run my notebook with a Compact Flash card in the notebooks built in CF slot, and run my swap file on that. It's been a while, and it still hasn't died.
It's quite a long time - a sector isn't written 10,000 times sequentially, the hardware in the chip moves the writes around to avoid wearing out any single element (wear levelling), and if any single element does go it'll just ignore it, as you mentioned.
Any modern SD is likely to outlive the phone, basically. I've got entire computers running off SD and I've never had a failure (hard drives fail way more often, due to their mechanical nature).
my android is running off a SD card.

Home Slowness & App Organization

So I've rooted and SD apped my G1, and have been loving every bit of it. I do have one question though about speed.
This is not really related to rooting or SD apping my phone it's more along the lines of the speed of "Home"
I often find that the more apps i move to my home screen (or your fav home app 'open home' 'ahome' etc), that going to the home app takes a long time to load.
When I only have a few icons then it's faster generally speaking. But I have about 7 folders with maybe 7-10 apps in them on avg, to keep my screen organized, but it seems that I will never get around how slow it is due to the amount of icons i have in the folders on the screen.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make the home screen any faster while keeping my apps organized?
I was thinking along the lines of maybe a Labeling App that lets you categorize your apps...sort of like how the Market lets you search for them. Maybe this way...a reference to a label could at runtime go and pull up the apps you've labeled as such...as opposed to having physical app links in a physical folder...thus forcing the home screen to load all of your organized apps (that you're not even using at the moment)...slowing it down.
Tips & tricks welcome!
swapit !!
http://www.cyrket.com/package/lv.n3o.swapper
dixxa said:
swapit !!
http://www.cyrket.com/package/lv.n3o.swapper
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Click to collapse
Could you provide some kind of testimony about this app?
Is there any side effect of that mod what are the concret and noticable benefits?
I have the default 2GB scandisk card in my phone, is it fast enough to do SWAP? I have no clue how crappy or neat is that card in terms of speed.
Thanks
friggin sweet! worx awesome!
man this app wont destroy your card
it'll create a file named swap on you /system/sd/
and boost you little phone it's free feel free to test
if you don"t like it disable it and restart your phone .
that's all !
nice site thanks
It WILL shorten your SD Card's lifetime significantly!
There is a limited number of reads/writes before the SD card begins to corrupt.
well well well
http://communities.sandisk.com/sandisk/board/message?board.id=memorycards&thread.id=614
directly from sandisk's forum ... so please stop talking nonsense ...
dixxa said:
well well well
http://communities.sandisk.com/sandisk/board/message?board.id=memorycards&thread.id=614
directly from sandisk's forum ... so please stop talking nonsense ...
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That might be for normal usage.
Using the disk as a swap drive IS NOT NORMAL USAGE!
And it still doesn't change the fact that there's a limit to how many times you can read and write to a flash memory chip.
I read an article about a TV company who were trying out SSDs (based on flash memory, the same tech) as a fast way of providing on-demand TV over the internet.
The drives lasted about 3 days... and that's professional drives..
I'm not saying you will burn out your card in 3 days... but you will decrease it's lifespan from maybe 2 years to 1 year or maybe 6 months.
Does it really matter micro sd cards are so cheap I got an 8GB class 6 card off newegg for $15 w/ free shipping. Just make sure you back your crap up every so often. Which you should do anyways.
speoples20 said:
Does it really matter micro sd cards are so cheap I got an 8GB class 6 card off newegg for $15 w/ free shipping. Just make sure you back your crap up every so often. Which you should do anyways.
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Not really, except that - as you say - you should be aware of it, so that you're not suddenly left with data loss and a semi-bricked phone ;-)
Don't worry sandisk microSDHC have something like 10years life span and believe me you would change card before the swap "kill it".
After using Swapper for a few days i uninstalled it. So it's not really resolved my issue. it seems to lockup the whole phone when not in use for a few hours or so. nothing responds, and I have to pull the battery to get it to turn off. nice concept...and when it was working, it worked well. just not sure why it freezes the phone after phone inactivity.

Read-Only MicroSD cards suck!

Ok, been fighting with my G1 phone for over a month.
First it was the phone shutting down because the battery life was a whopping 5mins of any use. That was killing the OS, so kept having to reinstall.
Now that I got a replacement battery, it seems that something is causing my 8GB MicroSD card to stay 'read only' when I plug it into my usb-flash reader on my Ubuntu system.
I severely need to reformat my whole phone and start fresh but seem to be kinda screwed at the moment because of this damn card issue.
I have scoured the web and it seems this is some sort of stupidly common problem and I am just stunned at the sheer lack of solutions that work.
So, I am hoping that someone here can help and direct me to have a decent phone once again and not feel totally worthless and ashamed when I tell people I am a tech but can't fix my own damn phone.....
30 year-old trick does that job!
http://www.camerahacker.com/Forums/DisplayComments.php?file=Storage/memory_card_locked.html
This is just a guess, but I remember back when I was using linux (Gentoo or Ubuntu I think) FAT32 partitions were mounted read only, it was a limitation of the OS. I remember the documentation saying it was possible to mount it read/write but strongly discouraged.
This was a long time ago though, and to be honest I'm not sure if it was a FAT32 or NTFS partition that I had that problem with.
That's NTFS. Hasn't been any problem writing to FAT32 in a looooooooooong time. Also it has been safe to write to NTFS for some years now.
Are you using a MicroSD to SD adapter? There's a little switch on all SD cards making them read-only. Flip it and you should be good to go.
EDIT: Just saw you just noticed it
Actually wasn't a switch. A poorly designed adapter that broke at some point where the 'switch' is supposed to be. Cheap plastic.

So, what's the SD card situation in ICS?

So, if you haven't heard, the news we have so far says ICS removes USB mass storage, likely due to Google's efforts to pressure everyone to use the cloud instead. so now I'm curious have they nerfed sd card support as well? for example, in honeycomb, there was already no support for writing to sd, which meant you couldn't even install apps to an sd card, like earlier android versions. I'm wondering if they're planning to carry the limitation over to ICS.
It wouldn't surprise me if they never gave the function to tablets; after all, since it was a limitation for Honeycomb tabs to begin with, all the manufacturers started out releasing honeycomb tabs with larger memory than they did to phones, since users wouldn't be able to get much use out of a tab with only 300 MB to write to. but since ICS is for phones AND tabs, and so many existing phones don't have a large amount of onboard storage, no write support would mean google is effectively banning a LARGE amount of otherwise good phones from ICS by blocking adoption of Market apps, which gives users less incentive to stay in the Android ecosystem when they get their next upgrade.
anyway, what's the situation? anyone know, maybe some devs who've looked at the ICS source?
No Sd
If this is the case it'll suck!! lol
Even if this is the case and they do not offer SD storage on ICS it will not effect cooked roms at all (devs will get apps2sd going). With that said ICS does come in the phone flavor so I really do not see Google going backwards and removing features such as SD storage but like you said everyone is pushing for cloud storage.
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk
ICS supports SD cards, it just does not support usb mass storage. That means when you hook your phone up with usb, you cannot read/write to the SD card. This is actually more of an issue with phones that DON'T have an SD card, as I can just take my SD card out and put it into my computer and do everything I need to. This doesn't mean you can't add or remove files, you just use MTP to do it. Yea, it is a little bit of a pain in the ass, but we will get use to it. And really, what is the alternative? An Iphone? Then you will have to go about it the same way..just with Itunes.
Alot of people prefer MTP because it doesn't unmount the SD card to achieve mass storage capabilities.
lowandbehold said:
ICS supports SD cards, it just does not support usb mass storage. That means when you hook your phone up with usb, you cannot read/write to the SD card. This is actually more of an issue with phones that DON'T have an SD card, as I can just take my SD card out and put it into my computer and do everything I need to. This doesn't mean you can't add or remove files, you just use MTP to do it. Yea, it is a little bit of a pain in the ass, but we will get use to it. And really, what is the alternative? An Iphone? Then you will have to go about it the same way..just with Itunes.
Alot of people prefer MTP because it doesn't unmount the SD card to achieve mass storage capabilities.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
MTP may have its advantages, but it can't fully replace USB mass storage's functions. without drag and drop to ANY computer, file transfer and management becomes limited. this is one of THE major reasons I chose Android as a smartphone OS to begin with, after hassling with an iPod touch for 2 years. Fact is, I have actually NEEDED the function many times; the lack of it would have caused some serious problems for me. I'm not going to go into each situation I've had here, but here's my bottom line: *most interesting man in the world impression* I don't always need USB mass storage, but when I need, it, I NEED it.
anyway, from a non-ranting perspective, I'm intrigued as to what this OS change is going to do to the market for smartphones. Assuming Google doesn't give the option back, I'm predicting three consequences, each not too big on its own, but altogether, problematic:
1. OEMs may be even more reluctant to update existing phones to ICS, for fear their users will be upset at the loss of the function - as if the updates situation wasn't constricted enough already.
2. for the same reason as above, some OEMs may be more likely to release their upcoming phones with 2.3 instead of 4.0+. keep in mind, some OEMs are still releasing "new" phones on froyo, despite it having been replaced by Gingerbread for a while now. they do this now almost entirely as a cost cutting measure. when you add in the fact of at least one functional downgrade? they'll get worried that at least some new customers will get spooked by it and... (see problem 3). something also worth considering here, which many people have already pointed out, is that many of the new features of ICS, especially its new interface changes, are very similar to mods that Samsung and HTC have already put into already released versions of Sense and Touchwiz. So many regular users, when browsing for a new phone in store, wouldn't even see all the "new" features of ICS as any different than many of the other in store models. most people don't spend hour after hour online researching every little feature and quirk of every phone; they just go in, play with demo models a little bit, ask maybe a couple questions about the phone itself, which the worker probably can't answer, then picked based on a few minor differences.
3. as you pointed out, the alternative is to buy an iPhone - which many people will do. Android's only real advantage over the iPhone isn't that it works better, because it doesn't: its major market advantage is that it does MORE than the iPhone, even if it could use improvement in its implementation. If Android's ability to do more keeps getting slowly downgraded, AND the iPhone slowly but surely copies more of what Android does (see EVERYTHING in iOS 5 for example) then there's going to be a significant amount of people choosing iOS over Android. maybe not people on this board, but believe me, that's how a significant amount of regular people are going to look at it.
Oook...all I did was answer your question...so buy a phone with an SD card...no issues then. Just pop it into a converter and pop it into your computer...drag and drop until your hearts content.
lowandbehold said:
Oook...all I did was answer your question...so buy a phone with an SD card...no issues then. Just pop it into a converter and pop it into your computer...drag and drop until your hearts content.
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sry if I came across as defensive or something, I'm actually just really into analyzing the issues with the development of tech markets.
removing the sd card can solve the problem sometimes.... but not all the time. many computers don't have sd card ports, especially ones at businesses, but also personal computers that are just slightly low end, or only slightly older. (macbooks didnt have SD card ports until 2009, and they tend to last pretty long, so those models will be around for a while.) even if a computer does have an sd port, it's usually a regular size one, not micro, so you need an adapter on hand. yet those adapters are less likely to be around than a micro usb cable is.
Falkner09 said:
sry if I came across as defensive or something, I'm actually just really into analyzing the issues with the development of tech markets.
removing the sd card can solve the problem sometimes.... but not all the time. many computers don't have sd card ports, especially ones at businesses, but also personal computers that are just slightly low end, or only slightly older. (macbooks didnt have SD card ports until 2009, and they tend to last pretty long, so those models will be around for a while.) even if a computer does have an sd port, it's usually a regular size one, not micro, so you need an adapter on hand. yet those adapters are less likely to be around than a micro usb cable is.
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They sell the adapters at wal mart for like $5, and you can get an SD card reader with USB to attach to a computer for a couple dollars as well..I completely agree that the loss of USB mass storage capability sucks...but we are still better off than apple users. And im pretty sure the devs will figure out how to get it working on custom ROM's.
Lack of mass storage will be major step back in my opinion, Looks like everyone is heading towards Apple way of thinking. Forcing the user to use the "ecosystem."
What are these?
What are these files? Will they work on my 3G only Xoom? Or is it just wishfull thinking?
http://goo-inside.me/roms/teameos/stingray_cdma
Eos-stingray_cdma-9.zip
Eos-stingray_cdma-9a.zip
full_stingray3g-ota-eng.solarnz.zip
---------- Post added at 04:36 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:10 AM ----------
I just realised that I posted in the wrong place. Sorry people.

Innovation on Storage in Mobiles - IDEA

Hello Everyone,
In present times, if a company does not "innovate" or CREATE then its done for them..
But innovation has taken on to mobiles like anything.
You have OSes, you have hardwares the might of a mini-supercomputer wrapped into the mobile phones, and you have accessories to take that to the next level as well.
Above all if something lacks then it might be compensated by an application to some extent.
But of late these mobile manufacturers have started making fun of the very consumer who buys it from them and gives them business.
Cost competitiveness is the forte for a mobile phone company, but I simply do not understand why this ridiculous 16gb and 64gb variants for specifically the versions WITHOUT AN EXPANDABLE STORAGE..
FRUSTRATING AND @@[email protected][email protected]$$ what not...
YES this thread is about the LIMITED STORAGE ISSUE, you guessed it right..
Well you now have companies offering accessories which can personalize your device with NFC, extended battery, Music centric features, slider keyboards and stuff like what next.. in the back panels/ back covers.....
I have a innovative idea myself, well they dont call me the strategist just like that.....
What if an accessory was to extend the storage of your device....
like make a 16gb non external sd storage device get extra from a back cover or plate.....
If something can be possible, then this would be awesome because we people who need that extra storage wont have to clammer for a OTG or Pendrives.....
Pls some BACK Cover for this purpose to extend the storage so that we dont have to fiddle with an OTG option which is an extra and this will also be like fixed/ permanent with the mobile ...
let me know your thoughts on this people....
Warm Regards,
I have a cool idea, what if we could have an access port on each phone that could accept the cards of your choice.
Like first you buy the hardware (phone) then you can have your choice of cards that the memory for the entire phone would use, the only internal memory installed on the phone would be what was needed to hold the rom, the card would have two seperate modules, one for the ram, the the second for the storage.
As far as making it universal to all phones manufacturers would set forth a common socket to be used (much like a crazy microsd slot)
This would make manufacturing the hardware alot cheaper and add more customization at the consumer level
So the card would come with say a standard 2gb ram/14gb storage and as you go you could have say 16gb ram/16gb storage,
Design could be based on the current class 10 microsd only with it having 2 different module set and having direct access from the cpu via a memory manager.
O and when we switch phones all our information would go with us because we could put it in our new phone and our phones numbers, apps, (granted will need reinstalling,) txts, pics, ect
Sewrizer said:
16 GB ram is impossie due to other hardware limitations. Internal memory must be embedded to the motherboard to prevent disconnection and to maximize speed, because you will have your system in there, after all.
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Click to collapse
Ram dose not haft to be hard wired to the board, look at pcs with expandable memory. My point is you would have 2 physical cards in one with access point for both witch will be controlled by a memory manager that is directly connected to the cpu. We are on the move to ddr4 witch means memory will hit the 22nm scale so packing 16, 32, 64, ir even 128gb would be no problem. Also with high transfer rates of ddr4 module lag between card, manager, and cpu would all be dependent on the set bus speed for the cpu and throughput of the manager
Edit
Yes physical hardware problems right now. I mean in the next batch of phones. This is mainly just for r&d and it is possible. Ya know 10 years ago 4gb of ram was unheard of in any pc, now we have it in a phone

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