Why did SFS size change from 256 to 260MB?

[YoN]

HI,

I use the old desktop PC of Celeron 533MHz, RAM 256MB.

In the case of Implementation 256MB RAM, SFS file was copied to RAM till now, and could eject a CD, but I heard that it became 260MB in upup-476.

Therefore an upup-476 live CD could not eject from my PC.

Why become 260MB? Should not it be 256MB?

[floborg]

It seems like machines that are on the ragged edge of the SFS copy RAM threshold vary a great deal in how well the live system behaves once it's up and running. I remember Barry lowering the threshold down from 256 at my request for a Puppy 4 release. Now that it's back to 256, I suspect he either accidently used a different version of the init script or found that most systems with less than 256 MB of RAM would not behave well with the SFS in RAM.

Really, this should be a boot option. There's an option to force the SFS to NOT be copied to RAM, but no option to force it to be copied to RAM. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong here.

[Sylvander]

How Puppy works.

I'm a Puppy Linux newbie, and I may be wrong, but I think...

Puppy runs in a RAMdrive.

And that Ramdrive is loaded into the memory hierarchy.
Which means it goes no further than RAM if there's enough RAM.
But if it's too big to fit in RAM it overflows into the Linux swap partition, if one exists and has been detected by Puppy and brought into use.

If you don't make a Linux swap partition...
Puppy may not be able to be totally loaded into the available size of RAMdrive.
That's if the RAMdrive is too small for the need, because RAM is too small and there is no Linux swap partition.

[YoN]

floborg,

I think there are still many persons who use under 256MB RAM PC like me.

I want to use puppy5 with this PC. So I hope puppy5 keeps RAM limits 256MB.

Sylvander,

I have 500MB Linux swap partition.


Watching boot messages,
"Loading swap partition...." appears in puppy-4.1.2.
But message not appears in upup-476.

Starting screenshot are thus(Both boot option "pfix=ram");
puppy-4.1.2(CD-drive is not mounted)


upup-476(CD-drive is mounted)


These are the same PC.

[Béèm]

YoN
In order to see all boot messages you can give the option loglevel=7 or if you boot from CD puppy loglevel=7 at the 5 sec pause.

[YoN]

Thank you Béèm for your advice. I tried option "puppy loglevel=7" booting from CD.
But I couldn't read messages with my poor english.

I saw /var/log/Messages, and found this line;

Code: Select all

Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: Adding 514072k swap on /dev/sdb3.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:514072k

I think that swap partition was correctly mounted. But CD-drive(sr0) is still mounted.

Code: Select all

..................
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: ata2.00: ATAPI: SONY    CD-RW  CRX145E, 1.0b, max UDMA/33
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: ata2.01: ATAPI: OEM CD-ROM 48SSB,  1.20, max UDMA/33
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: ata2.01: configured for UDMA/33
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.notice kernel: scsi 1:0:0:0: CD-ROM            SONY     CD-RW  CRX145E   1.0b PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.warn kernel: sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 32x/32x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.info kernel: Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.debug kernel: sr 1:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.notice kernel: scsi 1:0:1:0: CD-ROM            OEM      CD-ROM 48SSB     1.20 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.warn kernel: sr1: scsi3-mmc drive: 36x/48x cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray
Jun  5 02:29:25 (none) user.debug kernel: sr 1:0:1:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr1
.................

I can't understand/analyze these logs.
I don't know why CD-drive is mounted, though my PC has 256MB RAM.

[gnz11]

with pmount.

in some of the newer puppies, hotpup(the drive icons) doesn't unmount the boot disk when it reaches the desktop.

but if you use pmount it will unmount or it will have a warning saying do not unmount if it is required.

there is more than one way to go about things in puppy.