ShALLaX.com Forums

My xbox has been swapping wildly since I added azureus to it. I start it over vnc in blackbox to help conserve resources. I was wondering if it possible to make use of the ram in my desktop computer to assist the xbox. I was thinking of making a ram disk on my desktop computer then using NFS to mount it on the xbox as swap. I have heard it is slower than real ram of course but I dont really want my Harddrive going through this abuse anymore. I have 100mb network connecting my computers through a router so the network speed is comparable to a the hard drive thats in it.
The optimal way would be to install another 64MB of ram from a dead box, I have a dead box but am missing a few of the tools I need to pull that off, so that will have to wait.

Here are a few pages that make me realize my idea could possibly work, but I would like to hear some input from some people that might know about this already.
http://nfs-swap.dot-heine.de/
http://www.pcxperience.org/thinclient/d ... pping.html

Edit: I just noticed the latest NFS-Swap patch is for the 2.4.21 kernel but my gentooX kernel is 2.4.22. Might thro a wrench in my plans.

I don't think that it will make much difference whether your swap is on the xbox or mounted over nfs. The truth is that azureus will give your harddrive a thrashing anyway due to the way that it works

I think reading 3.6 MB/s while transmitting less than 10K/s is not normal, or recieving 20K/s and writing 250K/s. it seems like the hard disk activity could be reduced a lot by telling it to use a networked ram disk for swap instead of the actual disk.

You can see that my other computer has unused RAM that I would like to temporarily tap in to. until i either get a new power supply for my other server or the equipment to remove the ram from the dead box i have.
Since the xbox is limited to 64MB ram normally I think this could be important info for some people,

if your desktop is a much better machine, just run the server there

This from one of the pages:

"Network swapping" as it is usually called is obviously much slower than having a much faster and more capable secondary storage device for doing virtual memory swapping.

And this from the other:

Swapping via NFS is really slow.

I'm interested in your results if you do decide to try it =)

I havent had much luck with this so far. mostly im having problems learning how to just recompile the kernel. I have been trying with various kernels but always end up with errors while compiling or when booting. I have been using this page as a guide - > http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/cgi-b ... lCompiling

Apparently that is an old page and I'm not sure how different the process is now but it compiled fine so i replaced the old kernel with it (after backing up my original one). and when i set it to boot it gives an error like "cannot open dev/console".

I need to learn how to compile the kernel before i can patch it.
Is there any thing on that page that might be obviously out of date?
im trying the 2.6.9 kernel source and xbox patches from the cvs.
is the 2.6 kernel not ready just yet? I know the patches for the NFS-swap are for older kernels but i just trying to learn a thing or two .

i noticed the first error i got on the 2.6.9 kernel is with it says there is no such device.
all the other errors i get are also about files missing.
i guess i forgot to put fatx in the kernel, or else its broken
well i will try again soon

i came across this recently. My xbox does not have gentoox on it right now so i cant try it but it looks interesting and on topic.
http://www.gc-linux.org/wiki/Memory_and ... he_network

This is kind of cool. It may be slow, but using a fatx loop is really slow. I wondoer if using this would be faster. . . At 100Mbits full-duplex this could provide suffecient speed, while keeping the CPU usage low. . .I might have to give it a try.