An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Memory filesystem


If I recall correctly, Manjaro sets up several memory filesystems. Any thoughts on introducing memory filesystems for /tmp and friends on our Debian builds?

The plus: Less flash wear.

The minus: on a memory constrained system such as the Pinebook Pro (and in particular in combination with 64bit binaries) this might result in more paging.


Note: When I was running Manjaro for some time, emacs's cscope mode was requesting more space in /tmp than what was configured. So, with a conservative /tmp size, we may run into problems from time to time.

I've been very successful with implementing zram-swap, as outlined here zram swap support for the PBP; aka: "how to download more RAM" by  @"Arglebargle"  

On the PBP, with Bullseye at least, this is not without minor problems. It causes lsblk to hang, which interrupts common operations, like updating initramfs from apt/dpkg/etc. I worked around this by manually turning off swaps and unloading the module for these tasks.

Otherwise, zram-swap should be almost considered for default, as it addresses your concerns about solid-state storage wear and swappiness - while increasing functional RAM availability. Android has this standard for years, and little wonder, considering the target devices and their use cases.

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've observed some issues with my FDE system when there are times that the boot hangs waiting for the device (see attached). To fix it I just cycle power it off and on a few times until it works. Am I the only one? It can be a hardware issue?

https://pasteboard.co/ISow5Qc.jpg

I've run these for my PBP off of USB, SD, emmC and now NVMe. I haven't had a timeout with encrypted LUKS at boot. Are you booting from SD? Just guessing, this may be a lower-rated or "worn" SD card.

I'm using the internal eMMC exclusively

Enviado desde mi ONEPLUS A5010 mediante Tapatalk

Ah. It was worth a shot. My eMMC, on two different machines, haven't had this problem. I'd still bet it's the particular chip, or partitions and formats.
If your parts/formats are standard from the debian-installer script, I'd eliminate those, as I again have two working examples - 64 and 128 Gb.