Putting aside the great looks and being a truly remarkable machine one fact that made me buy a PS3 was the fact that I could install Linux on it. As soon as I found the Terra Soft website I started the YDL 5.0 download and ran to the shop to get my PS3. Abount an hour later my linux booted, and I realized there are few things I had not considered. These are as I see them the main disadvantages of the PS3, when it comes to Linux:
It runs linux in a hipervisor - this means disk access is very slow, video is confined to framebuffer only and is very slow as well * The system memory is extreamly limited.
In this article I want to share a cool solution I've found the latter problem. When running Linux on the PS3 due to the very limited memory, the system swaps a lot (i.e. it uses the hard disk for memory). Now considering the extreamly slow disk IO (26MB/s!) starting and even using programs can be a real pain. The solution I have is using flash storage to improve this. Since flash card access is also quite slow also I use 2 storage devices: a 512MB SD card and 1GB usb stick. Under my system the SD card shows up as "/dev/sdd" and the USB key as "/dev/sdf", these might not be same for you. Here is how to set it up:
This presumes your flash devices have been previously formated for you and contain a partition table. WARNING! This procedure will destroy all data on the SD card and the USB key! Open a terminal
Enter the following commands:
suYou are now running with swap space evenly distributed between the two flash devices. If you like it we continue the procedure: edit the following file:
[type in your root password]
/sbin/mkswap /dev/sdd1
/sbin/mkswap /dev/sdf1
/sbin/swapoff -a
/sbin/swapon -p 1 /dev/sdd1
/sbin/swapon -p 1 /dev/sdf1
/etc/fstabremove the line that contains the word "swap" in it. Add these two lines instead:
/dev/sdd1 swap swap pri=1 0 0You are done!
/dev/sdf1 swap swap pri=1 0 0
Ilian Tzankov
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